Writing, like being a governess, was a respectable profession for middle-class women who needed to earn a living, and could be a satisfying means of self-expression even for those who didn't. Victorian society had an insatiable desire for novels, journalism, and science. However, feeding that desire was rarely very profitable, and women who relied on writing alone for an income often had to apply to charitable organisations like the Royal Literary Fund, or petition for a civil-list pension. Women did write under their own names, although it was also common to use pseudonyms or initials; critics could be patronising to female authors. Some of the women in this chapter were closely involved with the feminist movement; most were acutely aware of the disadvantages they were under in not having had the education they would have chosen.

Eliza Meteyard's parents had been acquainted with Darwin's parents in Shrewsbury. She never married, but earned her living from writing. The option of earning a living as a governess was not open to her, as she was deaf. She was a council member of the radical and feminist Whittington Club, and a prolific author of novels and journalism, both under her own name and under the name Silverpen. Her interest in pottery, architecture, and design was bound up with the early arts and crafts movement. Most famously, she wrote a biography of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated potter. Hearing that she was engaged in this work, Darwin in 1863 sent her via her publisher letters between his paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and Josiah Wedgwood, his maternal grandfather. Meteyard's letters suggest a harried existence, with little of the financial security or practical assistance that Darwin enjoyed. The heroine of her semi-autobiographical novel Struggles for fame, faced with a proposal of marriage, announces, ‘The woman who wishes to excel in literature must be alone from the cradle to the grave.’ Instead, Meteyard relied on a network of friends.

In 1865, Meteyard sent Darwin a copy of the first volume of her biography of Wedgwood.

Religion was an important realm of authority for women in the Victorian period, despite their exclusion from the official hierarchies of the Anglican church and most dissenting denominations. Though widely regarded as inferior to men in intellect, women were considered equal, or even superior, in moral conduct. This assumption rested in part on their allegedly greater capacity for sympathy, and it opened leadership roles for them in areas such as philanthropy, education, and religious authorship. Depending on their wealth and social status, women might be expected to provide for the relief and improvement of the poor in the parish, or to teach in the village Sunday school. The home was also a place of religious devotion. As wives and mothers, women played a central role in the care of the household, in family prayer and the reading of Scripture, and in the moral upbringing of their children.

The Darwins and Wedgwoods were nominally Anglican. Formal adherence to Church of England doctrine was especially important for men, being an essential condition for admittance to many elite institutions, such as Oxford and Cambridge, which were important gateways to the most prestigious professions. In personal belief and practice, however, the families were Unitarian. Greater emphasis was placed on inner feeling and moral conduct than on doctrine, though belief in the afterlife remained important. The importance of prayer, Bible reading, and religious feeling are evident in letters from Darwin's sister Caroline, and his cousin and future wife, Emma Wedgwood. Tensions arising from Darwin's heterodoxy and immersion in scientific pursuits were addressed in correspondence between the couple after their engagement in November 1838. Other family letters discuss personal devotion in relation to ritual practices such as churchgoing and catechism, and provide a glimpse of Emma's moral role as educator of her children. The Darwins were active supporters of the church in Down, and on friendly terms with the local Anglican clergy, especially John Brodie Innes, who was the perpetual curate in the village from 1846 to 1868. Several years after his departure, a conflict of authority arose between the Darwins and the new vicar. Letters from Emma between 1873 and 1875 discuss this ongoing dispute, and convey her general dissatisfaction with parish affairs, and a shift of allegiance toward Protestant dissent.

Servants were a vital part of middle-class Victorian life. Female servants and governesses were part of the great army of women earning their own living. According to Harriet Martineau, writing in 1864, more than two million English women were self-supporting workers (Martineau 1864, p. 554.) When reading Darwin's remarks about how women could not be men's intellectual equals until they were generally breadwinners, it's useful to remember how many female breadwinners were living in his own household. Little correspondence survives between Darwin and his servants, and most is of a strictly businesslike nature. The Darwins were reportedly kind to their staff, who as a result stayed longer than they might have in other households. Emma and the children maintained relationships with some servants long after they had left the family, and where letters from the servants do survive, they tend to have been sent to Emma and the children. From these and letters to and from Darwin himself that mention servants, it is possible to get a clearer idea of their lives.

When the children were tiny, Emma had nurses to help her, the best loved one being Jessie Brodie. Before joining the Darwins, Brodie had been nurse to the children of William Makepeace and Isabella Thackeray. Brodie left Down after Annie's death in 1851, overcome by grief. Darwin paid her an annuity of ￡5. She retired to Portsoy, Scotland, near her birthplace. She visited the Thackerays and Down regularly until her death in 1873, and kept in touch by letter. She wrote the following letter to Henrietta after Henrietta's marriage to Richard Buckley Litchfield in 1871.

Darwin spent his life surrounded by spirited, enlightened, and supportive women, many of whom were actively involved in scientific enterprises. He relished female company and appreciated the precise observations, assiduous collecting of evidence, and the firm stand on principles of many of his female acquaintance. Yet he distinguished female capacities from those of human males in a deterministic and somewhat demeaning manner in the Descent of Man. The later part of this foreword will address that puzzling paradox and consider some of the pressures that go into it.

First, though, this cornucopia of correspondence demonstrates how throughout his adult life Darwin was in touch with an array of intelligent women. The letters from the Darwin Correspondence are here revealingly augmented with hitherto unpublished family letters in which ‘Charles’ or ‘F.’ (for Father) and his concerns are part of the network of preoccupations shared by very different people. Wherever you turn in this volume there are insights into the workings of the scientific community, often cast in the guise of acquaintance and gossip. The economics of funding research, the pressures of gaining a livelihood and sustaining a career, the innovative exchanges between friends and colleagues, are here understood anew as they become filtered through the experience of women, often acting as unpaid assistants, or translators, and research companions to their husbands, as was the case with Mary Lyell or Ellen Lubbock, for example. Indeed, Emma Darwin translated for Charles from French, German, and Italian and read much of his work as he proceeded. The particular significance of explicit, and implicit, exchanges sometimes emerges gradually through the organisation of the present volume, which is in terms of themes and clusters. These range from ‘Marriage’ to ‘Companion Animals’ and ‘Religion’ by way of ‘Children’, ‘Scientific Wives and Allies’, ‘Travellers’, ‘Servants and Governesses’, to the ‘Ascent of Woman’, with editors, and observing plants and humans, and other important topics on the way.

Darwin loved female company. As a boy in Shropshire, he spent time not only with his sisters and Wedgwood cousins, but with the Owen girls at Woodhouse. Later in life, Emma Darwin was entertained to see him flirting prettily, as she put it, with female visitors. He was on cordial terms with the ladies he met while he was undergoing hydropathic treatment, and Ellen Lubbock and Henrietta Huxley sent him teasing, funny letters. The formidable Lady Derby kept up an intermittent friendship with him in a series of visits and characteristically brief letters. As a old man, Darwin made an effort to reconnect with the Owen girls, sending a copy of his book on expression of the emotions to the elderly Sarah Haliburton, as she had become.

The first letter is to Darwin from an elderly friend of his family, Mary Congreve. At the time, in 1821, she would have been 75; Darwin was 12. Little is known of Mary. Her brother William, comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, where ammunition was manufactured, became a baronet, and his son, William, the second baronet, became famous as a rocket designer. It's tempting to suggest that the Congreve family might have fostered Darwin's youthful interest in chemistry.

Marriage was a pivotal moment in a Victorian woman's life. Women were often pitied because they only had the choice to say yes or no to a suitor (and sometimes, not even the choice to say no), rather than courting any man they liked, as a man might, in theory, court any woman. The character of a husband, how he meant to comport himself within the marriage, and the profession and family alliances that the wife would find herself involved in, were of vital interest. The status of a married woman was generally higher than that of an unmarried woman, and she might have more resources at her disposal; but she might also find herself at the mercy of a spendthrift or tyrannical husband, or unfriendly in-laws.

Darwin had four sisters (Marianne, Caroline, Susan, and Catherine) and numerous female friends and cousins, many of whom were diligent correspondents while he was on the Beagle voyage. His departure for South America coincided with an outbreak of weddings among his friends and relations, which was unsurprising given their ages, but must have left him wondering what, or who, would be left for him when he returned. The letters describing a series of weddings and their aftermaths are a wonderful source of information about mid-nineteenth-century courtship and marriage.

Shortly before he sailed, Darwin's friend Fanny Owen wrote in typically ebullient style about her sister Sarah's marriage to Edward Williams on 22 November 1831:

Only a few women wrote to Darwin about overtly feminist topics, but many of his female correspondents were involved with the suffrage movement and the promotion of women's education. Often they were also involved in the campaign against vivisection; for some, as for Frances Power Cobbe, female emancipation and protection of animals went hand in hand, both women and animals suffering under a malign social order. Such campaigners often felt that Darwinian theory was on their side. Darwin's books had stressed the continuity of humans with the rest of the animal kingdom, so that it was not feasible for Darwinians to see animals as soulless machines that only appeared to feel pain, as Cartesian philosophy suggested. Also, whatever his own political and personal preferences, his account of female subordination made it seem contingent upon historical circumstances: it could, in theory, be changed.

It's also clear from family letters that women in Darwin's family, and their friends, were very aware of contemporary debates about feminism. Some of them were involved in the setting up of Newnham and Girton Colleges at Cambridge. Henrietta found herself smoking cigarettes with the Stansfelds, well-known feminist campaigners, in France. She had discussions with her friends about what they really wanted from education: was what men had really the ideal? Women in their circle, even without raising any particular banner, were extraordinarily active: they learnt mathematics and physics; they hired tutors; they took examinations; they watched debates in the House of Commons from the ladies’ gallery; they attended university lectures if they were open to women.

Darwin himself was reticent on the subject. However, the surprisingly effective combination of women and opposition to vivisection spurred him to become a pragmatic supporter of scientific education for women. Women, with the moral authority resulting from their subordination and their motherly role, were effective advocates for an anti-vivisection law, even without the vote. Darwin lamented that if only they understood the medical benefits of physiological research, they would take a more moderate position. When the tricky subject arose of whether girls should learn physiology, he said they certainly should, if they wanted to. Possibly the drip-feed of barely voiced feminism that he had been receiving from his correspondence also had an effect.

Women also studied animals that didn't come into the category of companion animals: the correspondence chosen here has to do with barnacles, insects, and worms. (The term ‘insect’ was formerly loosely applied to any small or insignificant animal.) Although they might be collected for aesthetic reasons and studied purely for their own interest, the economic importance of these creatures should not be overlooked. Barnacles slowed down ships, insects destroyed crops, and worms were important to soil fertility. In this arena, female practitioners could be taken seriously: no one could risk doing otherwise, if it sounded as if they knew what they were talking about.

One of Darwin's earliest female correspondents on the subject of zoology (specifically, barnacles), and geology, was Mary Elizabeth Lyell, the wife of the geologist Charles Lyell and daughter of the geologist Leonard Horner. Leonard Horner had taken great care with the education of his daughters; when Mary was 5 years old he noted that she was getting on well in reading, and was learning geography. When she was 13, he was teaching her Italian, and when she was 18 he was congratulating her on her drawing, which she studied formally, and planning to study shells with her. Mary collected land snails on Madeira in 1854. She regularly travelled with her husband and presumably helped him with his work, although the extent of her contribution is unknown. The following letter to her from Darwin of 4 October 1847 suggests that she had her own collection of barnacles.