But in 1850 that is exactly what she did. When Thomas Arnold (son of the famous headmaster of Rugby School) arrived in Van Diemen’s Land as superintendent of education, it was love at first sight – for both of them. Tom was Julia’s polar opposite: introspective, gentle, a scholar by temperament, and was said to have been the most handsome undergraduate in Oxford. They were engaged within a month, marrying soon after.

It did not take long for the shine to wear off. Tom emerged as a man who could not manage his finances, always tended to take principles to the extreme (and change them), and complemented this by being extremely authoritarian in the home. Hoban is very good in showing what a prison that could be for a mid-Victorian woman. She had no property rights – and all financial decisions were the prerogative of the husband. Legally, a wife had no separate identity: marriage was, in effect, a trusting surrender. In this case, as in most, sexual passion soldered the couple together. Julia and Tom were to have eight children; another two were lost shortly before or after birth.

When Julia first met Tom, he had drifted out of Anglicanism to become an agnostic. But like a number of highly strung intellectuals of the day, he was enticed by Catholicism: he even wrote to his father’s old antagonist, Cardinal Newman, for guidance. Julia was aghast. Apart from financial risk at a time when religion was a prime social determinant, she had her own reasons for being anti-Catholic. Brussels for her had meant dark convent corridors, sacred morbidities, and the sniggers of schoolgirls who saw her as an outsider. But Tom was adamant, and in a special ceremony he entered the Church. The fiery Julia followed him with a bucket of stones and smashed a church window.

It did not end there. Although the governor confirmed Arnold in his appointment (even increasing the salary), Tom insisted on advancing the Catholic cause, which led to his dismissal. It became plain that he would have to return to Britain, where Newman offered him employment in Dublin. Tom was insisting that Julia, as his wife, should also convert to Catholicism as a matter of course. This she fiercely resisted, spiriting her daughters away to their Protestant relatives. More than that she could not do: in law, the children were property of the father, and in the event of separating from him, she would lose them.

Despite the velvet glove, Tom was an extremist by nature. It was almost as though he would follow a principle through to the point of exhaustion. Later, he would fall out with Newman when teaching under him at Birmingham and – since he had doubts about the drift to the doctrine of papal infallibility – would abandon Catholicism. Julia was overjoyed, and for a time things proceeded smoothly. They settled in Oxford; among their cultivated friends was Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’), the author of Alice in Wonderland. Indeed the first performance of a dramatised version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party took place in the extravagant house Tom built there. He had hopes – not unjustified – of being appointed to the chair of Anglo-Saxon. But at that very moment he decided to re-convert to Catholicism, and returned to Dublin to take up a post at the Catholic University.

Mary Hoban (photograph via Scribe)

Broken-hearted, Julia chose to remain in Oxford to be closer to her children. As they were launched upon the world, she could increasingly resist her husband and – since Tom put the choice in these words – become ‘a revolutionary wife’. Given Tom’s financial incompetence, and meanness, Julia took in genteel young ladies as boarders; the house was sold from under her. She succumbed to cancer – the seriousness of which Tom was slow to recognise. Although each had vainly tried to change the other, leading to an unusual story of distress, the physical passion they had shared led to a touching deathbed scene. Each forgave the other, Tom cherishing Julia’s memory.

An Unconventional Wife is superbly written, and skilfully draws on a number of diverse sources, compensating for a lamented lack – an intimate diary kept by Julia herself. Mary Hoban has got to the kernel of this story, since she has correctly conceived it as an exercise in the recuperation of women’s history. The flamboyant Tasmanian beginnings and the rather amazing afterglow – the two things usually associated with Julia – are reduced to being the bookends of an essentially tragic tale.

Nonetheless, the after-story is worth a pause. Julia turned out to engender a constellation of creativity among her children. Polly became the writer Mrs Humphry Ward, one of whose novels sold a million copies. Polly advocated women’s rights through education, rather than the vote, while the other daughter, Judy, was a suffragette. Judy would marry into the distinguished Huxley family, so that Julia would become the grandmother of both the novelist Aldous Huxley and the renowned biologist and first director-general of UNESCO, Julian (Sorell) Huxley. A granddaughter would marry the pre-eminent historian G.M. Trevelyan.

Even so, it invites a thought or two about Tasmania, then at the ends of the earth. For it gave birth to a leading Victorian lady novelist, educated Field-Marshal Montgomery of Alamein, and projected the swashbuckling Errol Flynn.