The rediscovery of the variety of women's non-fiction writing in the Victorian age is a fairly recent phenomenon. Some, like George Eliot, graduated from non-fiction to fiction: others like Margaret Oliphant kept their hand in both. Most concentrated on specific areas of interest like art history or devotional literature, natural science or translation. Their emergence has led Deirdre David to see the woman intellectual as ‘an increasingly powerful social figure’ in this period and Benjamin Dabby to detect in the nineteenth century a specific tradition of women writing as public moralists.

Julia's ambition exceeded that of most women writers. For all her passionate love of art, she avoided art history. Nor did she attempt detailed narrative history. When she wrote about religion, this was not as a guide to private devotion but an attempt to get to grips with the big questions of theology. Similarly, she looked at Classical thought and literature not for their pre-echoes of Christianity as Augusta Webster and Anna Swanwick did, but on their own terms as a key element in world history. Her chosen subjects in her mature years were those of the newly emerging ‘man of letters’: moral philosophy, theology, the Classics, world history and literature. The fact that women were largely excluded from this preserve did not deter her.

Her closest model amongst her contemporaries was Frances Power Cobbe. Cobbe was not only a brilliant journalist and a committed campaigner but also a fine, reflective writer on Kant, Darwinism and her own brand of Theism, which owed much to American Transcendentalism. While lacking Cobbe's quickness and ready wit, Julia's tone was more elevated and her range even broader. When Cobbe retreated to Wales in the early 1890s, the Glasgow Herald installed Julia in her place, describing her as now ‘the Thoughtful Woman par excellence’. By then she had published the first of her two big books, The Moral Ideal, and was working on her second, The Message of Israel.

In choosing a bigger canvas than her female contemporaries, Julia was aware of the hostile reaction she courted. She summarized the condescension of the Saturday Review towards women writers in a letter to Browning, wryly noting ‘their stock remark on all women's productions’, ‘it is gratifying to reflect that so much labour etc cannot but have produced valuable results to the writer, however etc’.