I first came across Julia Wedgwood in the selection of Browning's work and letters edited by Adam Roberts. Her surname was, of course, familiar. I assumed that she was some comfortably off lady who happened to know Browning socially and was intimate enough with him to offer her thoughts on his work. But as I read on through their letters, I discovered someone quite different: clearly very intelligent and at ease with a surprising range of literary references from Homer to Shakespeare, Shelley to Newman, but also quirky and unpredictable. Sometimes her sentences were complex and confusing: at others she came up with striking aphorisms. Though her criticisms of Browning's work were remarkably fearless, she could be self-deprecatory too. Browning's reactions to her criticisms suggested he set great store by them. ‘I take all your blame far better than other folks’ praise’, he wrote to her after she said that The Ring and the Book showed what he had lost as a poet through the death of his wife. He also valued her as a person. ‘I lost something peculiar in you, which I shall not see replaced,’ he told her when their friendship ended. Roberts published more of Browning's correspondence with her than with anyone else, apart, of course, from Elizabeth Barrett. Who was this ‘Dear Friend’? And what exactly was their relationship?

Turning to the Wedgwood family history written by Barbara and Hensleigh Wedgwood, I found a more orthodox figure: a woman keenly interested in the history of her family, brave and gifted, dutiful and only partly fulfilled – in other words, yet another example of the stereotypical middle-class Victorian spinster author. Following up on the hundreds of her letters in the Wedgwood Archive at Barlaston, the variety of her connections surprised me: not only Browning but her uncle, Charles Darwin, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, F. D. Maurice, most of the leading feminists, and, in her later years, E. M. Forster. Reading these letters I was also struck by the contradictory elements in her character. She could be morose but funny, acerbic as well as compassionate, both needy and generous and high-minded yet commonsensical.