Virginia Woolf called her one of the "great letter writers",[1] and Elizabeth Hardwick described her work as a "private writing career".

Phyllis Rose wrote "the quintessential expression of Jane's role within the marriage was her continuing battle to protect her husband from the crowing of cocks.

[8] Carlyle's biographer James Anthony Froude posthumously published his opinion, based on "gossip and rumor" circulated by Geraldine Jewsbury,[9] that the marriage remained unconsummated.

"[12] The Poetry Foundation's biography of Leigh Hunt says that his famous poem "Jenny Kiss'd Me" was inspired by Carlyle's wife.

The two women first met in 1841, when Jewsbury's letters to Carlyle expressing admiration for his work[16] and her religious doubts prompted him to extend an invitation to 5 Cheyne Row.

[23] Virginia Woolf based a 1929 article in the Times Literary Supplement on Jewsbury's letters to Jane Carlyle,[24] later published in The Second Common Reader.

Her sufferings seem little short of those in an hospital fever-ward, as she painfully drags herself about; and yet constantly there is such an electric shower of all-illuminating brilliancy, penetration, recognition, wise discernment, just enthusiasm, humour, grace, patience, courage, love,—and in fine of spontaneous nobleness of mind and intellect,—as I know not where to parallel!He continued with an estimation of her writing talents which became the basis of claims that Jane might have been a novelist, if only she had not married him:As to 'talent,' epistolary and other, these Letters, I perceive, equal and surpass whatever of best I know to exist in that kind; for 'talent,' 'genius,' or whatever we may call it, what an evidence, if my little woman needed that to me!

Not all the Sands and Eliots and babbling cohue [band] of 'celebrated scribbling Women' that have strutted over the world, in my time, could, it seems to me, if all boiled down and distilled to essence, make one such woman.

Phyllis Rose writes that "few women in history – or even literature – were more successful at making their husbands feel guilty than Jane Carlyle".

She saw her letters as a roman fleuve ... in which she recorded conversations, sketched what she called 'dramas in one scene' and reshaped her days for comic effect.

[32] In 1973, American scholar G. B. Tennyson described her as "one of the rare Victorian wives who are of literary interest in their own right ... to be remembered as one of the great letter writers (in some respects her husband's superior) of the nineteenth century is glory beyond the dreams of avarice.

"[citation needed] She died in London on 21 April 1866 and is buried with her father in St Mary's Collegiate Church, Haddington.

Jenny kiss'd me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in!