ABSTRACT
That Jane Welsh Carlyle controls her material and the presentation of her life in her writing through her literary skills is generally accepted. In July 1858, she satirically headed two letters written from Cheyne Row with 'Notes of a Sitter-still' and 'Notes of a Still-sitter'. But her 'annals of visiting' that could 'fill a volume', as she referred to a trip to Manchester in 1846, give evidence of a woman who was less sedentary - neither a 'Sitter-still' nor a 'Still-sitter' - than is sometimes assumed. They provide examples of a self-conscious narrator travelling beyond that 'home' and contain different kinds of travel narratives: explorations of the return to the familiar, voyages into the new, and awareness and a critique of the picturesque. Jane responds to landscape in terms of both the picturesque and the sublime, climaxing in her proper response of fear and terror at the 'stupendous rocks', yet she adroitly resists their formal requirements in her description.
