Julia Wedgwood, the Unexpected Victorian: The Life and Writing of a Remarkable Female Intellectual by Sue Brown

Reviewed by: Julia Wedgwood, the Unexpected Victorian: The Life and Writing of a Remarkable Female Intellectual by Sue Brown Mercedes Sheldon (bio) Sue Brown, Julia Wedgwood, the Unexpected Victorian: The Life and Writing of a Remarkable Female Intellectual (London: Anthem Press, 2022), pp. viii + 384, $150/ £100 hardcover. Born into the newly prominent Wedgwood family, Julia Wedgwood (1833–1913) grew up surrounded by such nineteenth-century intellectuals as her uncle Charles Darwin, Harriet Martineau, Jane Carlyle, and Charles Kingsley, among others. After her father discouraged her burgeoning career as a novelist, Wedgwood undertook what became a financially successful career as a periodical essayist, nonfiction reviewer, and profile writer. In the mid-1880s, she also wrote reviews of contemporary fiction. Her work ignored gendered boundaries, covering philosophy, theology, natural history, and the classics. Sue Brown concludes her biography of this wide-ranging author by noting that "[Julia Wedgwood] brought to her work a rare combination of charm and authority, high intelligence and mysticism, wide but uneven reading and a seriousness she never tried to hide as well as a constant willingness to learn and explore" (307). Brown's biography seeks to revise scholarly attitudes toward Wedgwood, which have been fundamentally shaped by her death in 1913 when she had "outlived her period of greatest influence and popularity as a writer" (304). Brown's biography surveys Wedgwood's influence and popularity as they developed across her lifetime and in the context of luminaries such as F. D. Maurice, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary and George Boole, and Richard Hutton as well as prominent debates on suffrage, women's education, vivisection, and the role of science within religion. Brown traces the complex shifts in Wedgwood's thinking about each of these through close readings of her private letters, her letters to monthly periodicals, and her essays for a range of upmarket monthlies. Brown's close reading of Wedgwood's periodical writing is of particular interest to readers of Victorian Periodicals Review. Although Brown does not undertake analysis of periodicals as either their own subject or as specific discursive spaces, she effectively situates Wedgwood within the milieu of the periodical press during the latter half of the long nineteenth century. Wedgwood published signed and unsigned articles in a variety of periodicals, including the Spectator, Contemporary Review, and Macmillan's Magazine. Brown draws on Wedgwood's correspondence to determine some of Wedgwood's article attributions. As Brown acknowledges in a footnote, "Identifying J. W.'s contributions to the Spectator is not easy now that R. H. Hutton's notebooks listing contributors in the 1870s and 1880s have been lost" (331n67). Brown notes that attribution becomes further complicated by Wedgwood's "boldness, [which has] tended to [End Page 472] conceal the place she held in the demanding world of upmarket periodical writing in the late Victorian age. Because we do not expect to find a woman writing about the variety of subjects Julia chose, we have not always seen her there" (307). Brown makes a compelling case for seeking Wedgwood's voice within the periodicals marketplace, although that case is secondary to her larger purpose of re-establishing "the scale of [Wedgwood's] achievement in both her private and public life. … She refused to conform with expectations about how Victorian spinsters should organize their lives, [giving] her the freedom to pursue her career as a writer, focusing on the big subjects that engrossed her" (306). One such subject was evolution: Wedgwood's two-part review of On the Origin of Species (1859) in Macmillan's Magazine (June 1860, July 1861) earned "generous praise from Darwin as one of the few who had fully understood his book" (81). The monograph is organized around four major phases of Wedgwood's life. Part 1 begins with microbiographies of her maternal and paternal grandfathers, her parents, and several of her Wedgwood aunts, including Emma and her uncle-by-marriage Charles Darwin. This section concludes with chapter 4, "The Young Novelist," which discusses Wedgwood's two early and only attempts at fiction: Framleigh Hall (1858), published under the pseudonym W. J., and An Old Debt (1858), published under the pseudonym Florence Dawson. As was the case for many women writers, her family disapproved...

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