Julia Wedgwood, The Unexpected Victorian: The Life and Writing of a Remarkable Female Intellectual

The first biography of Julia Wedgwood, the leading Victorian female intellect and writer, niece of Charles Darwin, intimate friend of Robert Browning and mentor of E. M. Forster. The book draws on a mass of unpublished family correspondence offering critical consideration of her ambitious range of non-fiction books, articles and novels.

Though Julia Wedgwood is still remembered as a commentator on the work of her uncle, Charles Darwin, and for her brief but intense friendship with Browning, her contemporary standing as a writer (“the thoughtful woman par excellence”) has been obscured as has her role in the pioneering days of women’s higher education and the first campaigns for female suffrage. Based on her extensive correspondence and unusually wide-ranging work, this biography unites the private person and the public writer. It also looks at her many relationships with leading Victorian cultural figures including not only Darwin and Browning but George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Frances Power Cobbe, F. D. Maurice, Richard Hutton, Arthur Munby and the young E. M. Forster. It considers the challenges facing a single, deaf Victorian woman in establishing her own independent, but unconventional, life.

• | Author: Sue Brown
• | Publisher: Anthem Press
• | Publication Date: Feb 07, 2023
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781839988592
• | ISBN-10: 1839988592