Julia Wedgwood on Robert Browning's 'Italian murder thing'

Abstract

Julia Wedgwood is now largely forgotten, except perhaps in relation to her failed relationship with Robert Browning though even Browning scholars tend to dismiss her as 'earthenware' to Elizabeth's 'porcelain. ' The ceramic metaphor is an appropriate one since she was the great grand daughter of the famous potter, Josiah Wedgwood. She was also the niece of Charles Darwin, a favourite pupil of James Martineau and F.D. Maurice, a friend from childhood of Harriet Martineau, from her teenage years of Mrs Gaskell and her daughters, and, later, George Eliot, as well as many of the Victorian feminists like Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, Frances Power Cobbe and Elizabeth Garrett. Born in 1833 she survived till 1913 and was, in the early years of the twentieth century, one of E.M. Forster's first literary mentors. Forster had a soft spot for 'Snow' Wedgwood, as she was known to her friends and family, and was one of the few reviewers to write sympathetically about her when her correspondence with Browning was published in 1937. After starting out as a romantic novelist, a successful career she quickly abandoned in the face of her father's strong disapproval, she established herself as a critic, reviewer, biographer, historian and moral philosopher-a very unusual career for a woman at the time. Jose Harris recently offered an important reassessment of her significance in the Oxford DNB, pointing out that her contemporaries saw her as second only to George Eliot in her ability to deal with 'masculine' subjects. From her late teens she suffered from increasing deafness.