For all the confidence of her early articles in the Spectator about confronting the challenges to religion through intellectual rigour, Julia was beset by doubt in the 1870s. The disparity between her reassuring public voice and her private despair troubled her. ‘I have used good words and sometimes have struck out high thoughts in collision with other minds,’ she wrote to Emily Gurney in 1871, ‘but when it comes to endurance […] there is no strength in me […] there is in me a perpetual thirst and craving which repels others and makes any word I have said of the peace of God hypocrisy.’ The 1870s were a time of ‘strange, dreadful misery […] the problem of [my wretchedness] was unremitting […] I saw nothing around me but evil […] it seemed put there by an omnipotent power’. ‘Sometimes’, as she confessed to Jane Gourlay, the rather dour Scottish teacher she had got to know at Linlathen, ‘an icy despair comes instead of patience when I try to wait for [spiritual assurance]. And then the plausible rational views of all my acquaintances press upon me like a choking vapour. I feel how like all this is to there being no God.’

She felt too that her idols had failed her. Had she been less prone to ‘idolatry’, this might not have mattered so much. Mack had died without any word of consolation, her friendship with Browning was broken, Erskine had turned away from her in his last unhappy months, Mary Rich was a burden on everyone at the end of her life, Maurice became over-fond of religious controversy and even her new friendship with the charismatic George Eliot came up against its inevitable limits after a couple of years. Though her deep affection for Aunt Emma remained, she also became increasingly disillusioned by Darwin's refusal to see his discoveries as part of the ‘religious education’ she believed them to be. Plagued by migraines and increasing deafness and left isolated by the marriages of both her sisters, Julia was profoundly depressed. Only Richard Hutton remained a reliable guide alongside the constant and solicitous Emily Gurney.