Julia Sorrell was the belle of Tasmania. When she meets the charming but reserved Tom Arnold, she falls head over heels in love and ignores the advice of others that it would be an ill-suited match. The love match soon dissolves into disagreements and discord that last for the rest of their married lives.

A somber warning about marrying in haste.

I found it fascinating to read an authentic life account from the Victorian era. I'd never heard of many of the persons presented in this book. It presents the first few chapters with hints of a novel, presumably to draw the reader in and make Julia more relatable, but I found it odd since this touch vanishes quickly.

This was a tough read at times. The marriage of Julia Sorrell and Tom Arnold was not harmonious, and they both were unwilling to compromise in their marriage. They both ignored the advice of those older who advised against it. They had nine children together, so they did love each other.

That love did not conquer all.

The book seemed as well researched as it could be. Some inferences made by the author seemed a stretch.

For readers who enjoy biographies may enjoy this. I received a free copy through LibraryThing's Early Review program. All opinions expressed are my own. ( )

Julia Sorell Arnold was daughter-in-law to the Thomas Arnold who reformed Rugby School and set the pattern for English elite education for generations. She married his son, Thomas the younger and became grandmother to Julian Huxley, the scientist and Aldous Huxley, the novelist. She loved her husband deeply, but their marriage ran aground on her refusal to follow him in his conversion from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic Church. A brief exile to a Roman Catholic girls school in Brussels had left her deeply prejudiced against the faith. Her husband regarded complete subservience as a wife's duty, but she could not agree. I found it odd that in an England so deeply anti-Catholic that Catholics were not admitted to Oxford until 1871, Julia did not receive more societal support for her decision. In addition to her personal rejection of the Church Julia had to cope with the effect of Thomas's decision on his ability to earn money and the effect it would have on the marriage prospects of their daughters. As it was she struggled to manage a household of 8 children (one child died in infancy) in the face of her husbands attitude that it was up to her to maintain the house on whatever he earned without using credit. He was apparently a complete financial idiot who, even when she was dying of breast cancer, bullied her on the subject until their adult daughter reproached him. But despite their ongoing conflict she remained in love with him.

Was there really no contact with the original inhabitants of Tasmania?

Deserted by her mother and raised as a rather conventional socialite,
Julia Sorell eventually fell deeply and irretrievably in love with shy, stuttering scholar Tom Arnold.

Her naturally independent personality coupled with her hatred of Catholics conflicted wildly with her husband's demands for
personal, financial, and domestic obedience and his conversion to Catholicism.

A fictional followup would be a meeting and correspondence with Sofia Tolstoy. Their marriages, flocks of children, and
religious and financial conflicts with their beloved husbands have much in common. ( )

Hoban draws on the letters of Julia Sorell Arnold and her family to deliver a highly readable and entertaining narrative which follows her life through the euphoric ups and stressful, disappointing downs of broken promises and accusations. Her passionate and conflicted marriage to one of the leading scholars of the era came to embody the times and produced descendents who made their own indelible mark upon the Victorian conflicts between men and women, Protestant and Catholic.

Even knowing that this book would be limited by what has survived of Julia down the ages (most of which pertains to her famous descendants) I was still interested in learning more about a woman I hadn't heard much about before. The size of the biography is rather compact and I was a bit worried going in that it would either be padded with information about the people who surrounded Julia rather than Julia herself, or so lean as to be uninformative and uninteresting.

However, I didn’t find that to be the case.

THE DEEP DIVIDE

As Julia is undoubtedly the subject, I suppose it’s only natural that I’d come out sympathizing more with her than with Tom. From Julia's early years in the shadow of her mother's scandalous affair, to when Julia has to decide, as a mother and wife herself, what she's willing to risk for her family, the portrait emerges of a vivacious woman used to forging her own strength and determination in the face of adversity. It was fascinating to discover how she actively worked to instill these qualities in her children amidst her personal struggles, and how far-reaching her impact was on Victorian society through them.

However, Hoban does seek to present a balanced perspective of the personalities involved. Both Julia and Tom were creatures of intuition, something which spurred their love as much as their conflict. Each could be inflexible and feel they were correct in their views, finding it difficult to understand the other. Julia's pride and her prickliness towards Catholicism in general could make it difficult for Tom to feel safe opening up to her.

Today, Tom Arnold the Younger’s struggles with his faith would most likely be viewed as a purely personal matter, of no consequence to anyone but himself. Julia might even be seen as intolerant and insensitive for wanting to stop her husband’s spiritual journey to a faith she couldn’t bring herself to understand. If the author is to be believed regarding the conclusion that Julia's afterlife has, indeed, largely been as the irresponsible spendthrift to Tom's patient, long-suffering genius. But, as Hoban states: “In the world that Julia and Tom inhabited, religion was never simply about belief. It was about position, about economic stability, about possible trajectories, not just for Tom and Julia, but also for their children.” (p. 178)

Tom had many qualities that made him a magnificent scholar and a likable person, but, past a point, his inflexible ideas about the duties his wife and children owed to him as head of the household were not balanced by his duties to them. In the end, it's that and the practical constraints of the times they lived in, rather than his spiritual confusion alone, that seems to form the crux of their problems.

RELIABILITY

I had already read some rumblings about the sources in the other reviews and I felt the same uneasiness when I started reading. I wondered; Did Julia speak or write somewhere about seeing the two hanging bodies upon her and her siblings’ return to Hobart? Did Julia’s discerning gaze really spur her mother to pack her off to boarding school so early? Or are these just Hoban’s imaginative touches to smooth over the gaps of Julia’s early years?

The first few chapters have a novelistic flair to them. Hoban has a gift for expressing Julia’s thoughts and feelings with gripping and poignant detail, but, as other reviewers have brought up, the solidity of the sources for these moments are few and far between, to say the least.

However, after these first few chapters this improved dramatically, and letters from the key players themselves describing their thoughts and actions comprised the core of the sources. If you like your biography straight with no embellishments the first few chapters might try your patience, but keeping up with the footnotes beyond these, I personally didn’t feel the same skepticism going forward. Obviously, others might feel differently.

FOOTNOTE FORMATTING

On a purely subjective and pedantic note; the actual formatting of the footnotes took some getting used to for me. They are unnumbered and unmarked in the text itself, and packed together by chapter in the back of the book. The organization is, more or less, in order of appearance, but is labeled by subject rather than passage.

Some readers may not mind that format, but, as I like to follow the footnotes as I read, I personally find it stressful and it can dampen the reading experience because part of my focus becomes split by trying to figure out where the notes go and anticipating them.

As time went on though, I got used to it, and with the author’s easy writing style didn’t have much trouble either following along as I read, or just reading the notes after I finished the chapter itself.

I still prefer textually marked and catalogued footnotes, but this, at least, was not a difficult book to follow and I suppose the formatting fits with the general nature of the book. It’s, again, a pedantic thing, but I figured I’d bring it up for anyone else who might find it a bit disconcerting. This was far from being the worst example I've seen of this method.

RECOMMENDED?

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the lives of historical women, particularly ones who haven't already had a million biographies written about them. There's also the broader context of the moral and spiritual conflicts that had rocked England for centuries coming to a boil and the further constraints enforced upon women by the Victorian marriage and property laws that's fascinating.

This biography does an admirable job bringing the strength and trials of a little-known woman to life and sharing her long-neglected side of things. It's intriguing and very readable in a fashion that is concise without sacrificing context for the age and events that enhance the subject rather than draw away from it. There are a lot of well-known and familiar names in here that were enjoyable to read about, but there were also so many others that aren't so well-known and whom I'm now keen to read more about in the future.

I can't say I personally found many drawbacks to this book other than the liberties in the first few chapters and the very subjective one about the footnotes. I suppose, though, if you're looking for a sprawling in-depth analysis of Tom Arnold the Younger's scholarship and genius this wouldn't be the book for it. This is very much Julia's biography.

Julia Sorell Arnold's life is indeed, fascinating for having crossed paths with such well-known figures as Tom Arnold, Charles Dodgson, and Dr. Elizabeth Anderson, as well as for having produced many more. Hoban establishes, however, that her life was also remarkable on its own terms, and she is remarkable as her own person. Now, at last, her perspective can be added to Tom's, her side finally told.

FINAL RATING: 4.3 stars ( )

Warning: This book will make you angry. If it doesn’t, then you may need a serious bout of self-reflection. Mary Hoban’s Unconventional Wife is a look into the life of Julia Sorell Arnold, citizen of Tasmania and the world, and in effect, marital prisoner of Tom Arnold the Younger. Much like many people born in the early 19th century, Julia had a growing curiosity of the world as new sciences and philosophies were being pieced together. She was a notorious social butterfly, but made deep and meaningful connections with those around her.

After meeting and falling in love with Tom Arnold, a lot of that inquisitiveness turned into anger. Tom, throughout his life, moved between hard Anglicanism and stubborn Catholicism and demanded that Julia be subject to both his whims and demands. This, combined with Tom’s absolute inability to hold down a well-paying job and keep up with the family’s finances, led to disastrous ends. When you couple that with the nine children they eventually had to take care of throughout all this, their marriage became a cesspool of torrid exchanges and insurmountable stress, leading in part to years of debilitating illness for Julia.

Hoban’s look at Julia’s life is maddening to say the least. Julia’s victories were hard-fought, but at least her children and extended family made great impacts on the world. Hoban’s work is as researched as it can be. Every once in a while, there is a piece of supporting evidence for one of her conjectures that comes from a contemporary fictional work that left me skeptical as to how accurate this biography was, but it’s the letters between the two of them that keep the narrative tight. ( )