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.

[4] 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.

[4] 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).

[9] Disseminating her father's mimetic origin of language theory in both her Macmillan's magazine (1862) and Westminster Review (1866) articles, Wedgwood's voice manifests through the way difficult concepts are broached for the non-specialist audience.

She set up her own household in Notting Hill and in the following years she helped her uncle Charles Darwin translate the works of Linnaeus as well as publishing an array of clear and precise articles on science, religion, philosophy, literature, and social reform.

For instance, in the Contemporary Review alone - one of the most influential later-nineteenth century journals, her titles spanning 1872 to 1987 included the following:[11] 1872, 'Female suffrage in its influence on married life’, 1877 - ‘Virgil, as a link between the ancient and the modern world’, 1878 – ‘Sir Walter Scott and the romantic reaction’,1881 – ‘Plutarch and unconscious Christianity of the first two centuries’, 1886 – ‘Aeschylus and Shakespeare: the Eumenides and Hamlet’, 1889 – ‘Male and female created He them’, 1890 – ‘The Midsummer Night’s Dream’, 1891 – ‘Euripides at Cambridge’,1892 – ‘Greek mythology and the Bible’, 1892 – ‘The message of Israel’, 1893 – ‘Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’, 1893 – ‘The message of Israel: the newer criticism and the ancient ideals’.

At her London home, Wedgwood also worked on "a history of the evolution of ethics in the great world civilizations, from earliest antiquity down to the scientific positivism and theological modernism of the mid-nineteenth century",.

[13] Five years later, she published a follow-up work to "The Moral Ideal" – "The Message of Israel" – with the aim of re-interpreting the Judaic tradition critically in the light of ‘modernism’.