Frances Julia Wedgwood

Frances Julia Wedgwood (6 February 1833 – 26 November 1913), also known as Florence Dawson, was an English feminist whose writing spanned philosophy, fiction, biography, history, religious studies and literary criticism. She was described as "a young woman of extreme passions and fastidious principles" and "at once a powerful reasoner and an inexorable critic of reason". Life and career Childhood Frances Julia Wedgwood was the daughter and the eldest of the six children of Hensleigh Wedgwood and his wife, Frances Emma Elizabeth "Fanny" Mackintosh, daughter of Sir James Mackintosh. (It is not common knowledge that Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood had seven children, not six. Their third child, Miles Wedgwood, died in infancy in 1836.) Fanny ran a salon in Cumberland Place attended by Macaulay, Thackeray, F. D. Maurice, Ruskin, and Carlyle. Julia was a great-granddaughter of the potter Josiah Wedgwood and a niece of Charles Darwin. Her strong intellect was apparent early - for example, she knew Latin, Greek, French, German and Italian. She was educated largely at home, with a period at Rachel Martineau's school in Liverpool, then attended lectures at Queen's College and Bedford College, London in subjects including logic, political economy and Latin. Early career and fictional works Wedgwood was acknowledged as "the cleverest of her generation" in the extended Wedgwood–Darwin–Mackintosh family and she acquired renown as a "brilliant conversationalist with a passion for scientific and theological debate". In her twenties she wrote the novels "An Old Debt" and "Framleigh Hall" addressing "intellectual conflict, confused gender roles, and ill-starred sexual passion", which were well received by the public. Faced with her father's disapproval of her writing skills and topics, however, Wedgwood abandoned a third novel despite encouragement by Mrs Gaskell, whom she assisted in research for The Life of Charlotte Brontë (published in 1857). She concluded that "she had no imaginative powers" and that her "mind was 'merely analytical'".