Other friends were Felicia Hemans, with whom she stayed in Wales in summer 1828, Barbara Hofland, Sara Coleridge, the Roscoes, the Dilkes, the Carter Halls, the Chorleys and Thomas De Quincey.

[4] Her paternal grandfather, Thomas Jewsbury Sr (died 1799), was a surveyor of roads, an engineer of canal navigation, and a student of philosophy.

The letter grew into a correspondence, and led to personal and family intercourse and steady friendship, but without direct benefit to her as an author.

Watts, who married Priscilla "Zillah" Maden Wiffen, the sister of Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen, the historian of the House of Russell, was less than two years older than Jewsbury, and aided her in her work, giving publicity to her occasional poems, urging her to write her first book, Phantasmagoria (1825), and finding a publisher for it.

In 1828–1829 he edited an annual, The Poetical Album, or Register of Modern Fugitive Poetry, to which Jewsbury became a contributor, as she did to several other volumes of a similar kind.

[11] The place was as little attractive as a cottage in Wales could well be, and its closeness to the road took away even its rural feel, but it had the advantage of being no more than half a mile from Rhyllon, and had its little garden and its roses, its green turf and its pure air.

There she stayed with her young sister and brothers; and there Mrs Hemans found her established on her own return from Wavertree at the end of July.

Many of the poems in her Lays of Leisure Hours, dedicated to Mrs Hemans, "in remembrance of the summer passed in her society", were written in the cottage.

Jewsbury enlivened the monotony of routine by directing attention to every striking change of weather and variety of appearance in the ocean, moon, stars, clouds, fog, and wildlife.

She entered with animated expectation into every new scene, keenly observing every contrast between Asiatic and European aspects of nature, art and social life, and every peculiarity of local manners and habits, more especially the character of the people in connection with their worship.

On his recovery, he obtained a medical certificate stating that his health would not bear the climate, and they set out on 26 September to return to Hurnee.

[5][6][20] After Jewsbury's death, her siblings Geraldine and Francis retained a collection of their sister's private letters, and of the manuscript "Journal of her Voyage and Residence in India".

All her letters, however hasty and unstudied, bore marks of a fine mind under the steady and habitual control of the highest principles.

The letters throw a clear light on one important trait in her character – the strength and constancy of its attachment – showing her father, her sister, her brothers, and her friends, to have been continually present in her thoughts.

In the first there is a misnomer; the heroine as a child may in parts be deemed enthusiastic, but grows up into a selfish woman of genius, full of worldly ambition that predominates over her few, weak social affections, valuing her rare abilities and attainments merely as a lever to raise her into the sphere of fashionable distinction, delighting in neither literature nor anything else for its own sake, not loving with any true affection that rests satisfied in finding an appropriate object, while regarding all adventitious advantages as pleasant superfluities, Julia seeks not the gratification of her friends, nor her own in theirs, nor in the joy of conscious usefulness.

Having an independent fortune, she neither writes for bread, nor for the additional comforts or luxuries of existence: fame, the trumpet-sound, the far reverberation, the adulation of strangers, the establishment of a name in the records of futurity: these form the great object of her life.

Julia is no genuine enthusiast devoting heart and soul, genius and its fruits, to the promotion of any extraneous or special purpose.

The gloomy hero resembles a planet that passes through deep masses of cloud, piercing them now and then with rays that promise a triumphant emergence.

It is less the ability displayed in the construction of either of these "Histories" that impresses readers with Miss Jewsbury's genius as the combined effect of the "Three 2", the able depiction of so many distinct characters, carrying with it unusual skill and still latent power.

Obsolete phrases of a local dialect haunt her prose, probably derived from daily conversation with uncultivated associates, caught up and made habitual before her taste was formed on purer models.

These faults are mentioned here chiefly to confirm that despite her natural fluency of expression and aptitude in selecting words, the general correctness and elegance of her diction resulted rather from vigilant care.