Emma Darwin: the inspirational wife of a genius, by Edna Healey

An enigmatic paragon of virtue

In 1838, the idea of marriage tormented the young Charles Darwin, then 27. Back from his voyage on the Beagle, he had begun to establish a name in scientific circles, and work was top of his agenda. A wife might get in the way. What to do?

On a scrap of paper, he jotted down the pros and cons. Stay single, and he would not be "forced to visit relatives" nor have "the expense and anxiety of children", nor suffer "loss of time" by being prevented from reading in the evenings. Marriage, on the other hand, could bring "object to be beloved & played with, – better than a dog anyhow." What's more, it offered "home, & someone to take care of house – Charms of music & female chit-chat. – These things good for one's health. – but terrible loss of time." In the end, perhaps surprisingly, Darwin opted for marriage: "it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.– No, no won't do... Marry-Mary-Marry QED."

His bride was to be was his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, the granddaughter of potter Josiah Wedgwood. A year older than Darwin, she had already parried four or five marriage proposals. But in 1838, Emma must have wondered if her courting days were over. When Charles proposed, she accepted.

Even the self-centred Charles must have noticed that this wife was quite a lot better than a dog. She brought a substantial dowry and was pretty, good-natured and accomplished. A fluent pianist (who had lessons with Chopin), a "dragonness" at archery, she knew Italian and French as well as some German.

In fact, Emma is such a paragon that any biographer must struggle to hold the reader's interest. Over her long life – she died in 1896, aged 88, outliving Charles by 14 years – nobody had apparently ever uttered a word against her. The worst that could be said was that she was not neurotically house-proud, and allowed her 10 children to make a mess now and then, before calling the servants to clear up.

She enthusiastically made a home for Charles first in Gower Street in London, then at Down House in Kent (now a museum). Heroically, she put up with Charles's endless illnesses and reluctance to entertain, and supported his enthusiasms – at one point, the billiards room was turned into a giant wormery. And, not least by periodically winkling Charles out of his study for a holiday, she undoubtedly prolonged his capacity for productive work.

But how did she cope? And what did she think? Despite the voluminous detail in Edna Healey's biography, based on Emma's diaries and letters, no strong sense of the woman emerges. Healey makes much of Emma's religious convictions, as opposed to Charles's agnosticism. But Emma was a freethinker, brought up in the dissenting Unitarian traditions of Staffordshire; her religious views were likely to have been as sophisticated as she was.

Alas, we learn little about Emma's intellectual world. Instead, the first half of the book recounts the lives of her illustrious forebears: Wedgwoods, Darwins and Allens. But do we really need to know that her uncle Tom Wedgwood committed suicide, perhaps as a result of opium addiction linked to covert homosexuality and his friendship with Coleridge? Or that her uncle John Wedgwood was terrible with money but founded the Royal Horticultural Society?

Emma said of Charles that he had the one quality she prized above all others: "he is the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts." As Healey shows, their marriage was clearly an emotionally close one. But did the well-educated Emma contribute to Darwin's intellectual life too? That central question is one Healey never raises. She has produced instead a "who's who" sort of biography, good on social detail, but sparse on anything else. Emma herself, lost in a sea of ancestors and descendants, remains an enigma.