Throughout her life, Jane Carlyle valued letters. "A newspaper is very pleasant when one is expecting nothing at all; but when it comes in place of a letter it is a positive insult to one's feelings." Francis Wilson writes that "Jane’s letters, which have lost nothing of their freshness and mischief, take us immediately into her world, or rather into the world as she chose to construct it. 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."