Thinking back to her college education 50 years later, Julia wrote that the difference between the sexes then was as great as the difference between rich and poor.

Given the surplus of women in the population, however, a lively point of concern amongst male commentators in the 1850s and 1860s, marriage was not available to all. ‘Women’, Julia crisply wrote in 1869, ‘spend the best part of their lives in preparing for an event which may never happen,’ ‘the time thus spent is not only wasted and unsatisfactory, but unreal.’

Living through this limbo of uncertainty at the end of an incomplete college education that opened intellectual doors but offered no obvious way through them, Julia struggled. Aimlessness never suited her. ‘I do not believe’, she later wrote, perhaps comparing herself with the feckless but reasonably successful Erny, ‘the idlest youth who just saves his degree at College, wastes more of his undergraduate years than an energetic girl of the corresponding period of her life.’ She concluded quite early on that she was unlikely to marry. This left her with a life-long sense of incompleteness but not the willingness to fall back on a shadowy life of spinster friends like Alice Bonham-Carter, attending to demanding elderly parents and relatives, supporting married siblings or friends and working unobtrusively for good causes. Julia had always had a sense of mission that grew in response to two serious bouts of illness in the early 1850s. It took time and some false starts before she found her way to a successful career as a writer and thinker.