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Julia Wedgwood (1833-1913) was a leading female Victorian non-fiction writer whose books and many articles covered an exceptionally wide range including biography, history, literary criticism, philosophy, theology and evolutionary sciences.

Julia Wedgwood (1833-1913) was a leading female Victorian non-fiction writer whose books and many articles covered an exceptionally wide range including biography, history, literary criticism, philosophy, theology and evolutionary sciences. She was also a campaigning feminist who knew many of the leading cultural figures of her age including Robert Browning, who she might have married, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet and James Martineau, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Victoria Welby and the young E. M. Forster as well as her aunt and uncle, Emma and Charles Darwin.

Sue Brown, who recently published the first biography of her (Julia Wedgwood, the Unexpected Victorian, Anthem Press 2022) will focus on her developing reactions to Darwin’s work. Her initial enthusiasm for On the Origin of Species continued with her interest in Darwin’s views on sexual selection in The Descent of Man but criticism of his destructive influence in a hostile review of his posthumous biography written by his son, Frank. Sue Brown will consider why Wedgwood’s views took this atypical course and how it meshed with her feminism and dialectical view of the course of world history.