Too much of an excellent woman

Whether feminism is the root cause or not, we have had a lot of biographies of writers' wives over the past decade - Norah Barnacle, Frieda Lawrence, to mention only two. Are we, in return, to get a series of lives of women writers' husbands? (I hope not - I would not read a line about any of Colette's husbands, for instance, though Leonard Woolf is interesting in his own right.) Emily Tennyson, like her husband a child of the rectory, was doubtless an excellent woman, but 700 pages about her is simply too much - it would be too much about her famous husband also, since Tennyson's life was not greatly interesting in itself. She was strong-minded, unselfish, devoted, managing, capable, and was much admired by some of the poet's friends; yet she remains curiously colourless, a figure in half-tones, like a Burne-Jones drawing. The truth must be faced that if Emily had married a deserving country clergyman instead of Tennyson, she would have ended as the wholly admirable wife of some bishop or other, but almost certainly would be forgotten outside a plaque or inscription in the local church.