Just as the 1870s were Julia's time of greatest religious doubt, so, too, her relations with her family reached breaking point. Both of her sisters contracted marriages that, in their different ways, disappointed her and also left her feeling yet more isolated and unfulfilled. She responded at the end of the decade by moving out of the family home to create her own household, an unusual step for an unmarried eldest daughter with aging parents in poor health. Even more singular was her choice of a younger, uneducated Welsh woman she had first spotted as a housemaid to act as her companion and take domestic charge. Once the new arrangement settled down, it was the making not just of Marian Hughes but of Julia too.

In November 1869 Julia went on holiday with Effie and Hope to Caerleon in South Wales, delighting in the company of her two sisters, ‘the two people whose society is the most welcome to me’. ‘It is so rare that we have nothing to think of but each other, as we have here,’ she enthused to Aunt Rich. More than thirty years would elapse before she rediscovered that pleasure. By then both Effie and Hope were widows.

Lively, self-confident and her mother's favourite, Effie had never been short of suitors. There was an unnamed Frenchman when she was studying in Paris, J. R. Seeley, who was always pressing her to come to Oxford and, unbeknownst to Julia, cousin Godfrey in Barlaston. But, like her mother, Effie took time to get round to marrying. Godfrey had come close to proposing early in 1862 but fearing that she would reject him stayed silent. In June he married Mary Hawkshaw, a distant relative of whose love he felt more certain. The marriage was a happy one until Godfrey blurted out to his wife his continuing feelings for Effie. Mary died in 1863 soon after giving birth to their only child, Cecil. Godfrey's grief and guilt kept him away from the Hensleigh Wedgwoods after that.

Hensleigh knew nothing of this when he despatched Julia and Effie to Barlaston in October 1871 in the hope of improving relations with his brother Frank and his children.