page_title: Julia Stephen
section_title: (1) Herbert Duckworth 1867–1870
hierarchical_section_title: Julia Stephen / Life / Marriage / (1) Herbert Duckworth 1867–1870
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Julia Duckworth, by unknown photographer n.d. -
context_page_description: Julia Prinsep Stephen was a celebrated Englishwoman, noted for her beauty as a Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
  Julia Jackson was born in Calcutta to an Anglo-Indian family, and when she was two her mother and her two sisters moved back to England. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who made more than 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work. Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a mutual friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law.
  After Leslie Stephen's wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878.
context_section_description: On 1 February 1867, at the age of 21, Julia became engaged to Herbert Duckworth, a member of the Somerset landed gentry,  a graduate of Cambridge University and Lincoln's Inn (1858), and now a barrister and they were married on 4 May at Frant. Julia Margaret Cameron took a number of portraits of her during this period, which Cameron considered symbolic of transition. The marriage was a happy one, Julia later stating "no one had tasted more perfect happiness...the greatest happiness that can fall to the lot of a woman". Julia's second husband, Leslie Stephen, had known Herbert Duckworth from when they were at Cambridge  together ten years earlier. He described him as "the kind of man who might be expected to settle down as a thorough country gentleman ... simple, straight forward and manly ... a singularly modest and sweet-tempered man”. Leslie Stephen felt "a touch of pain" later, in writing about the purity of their love, commenting on her letters to Herbert, he stated that she "made a complete surrender of herself in the fullest sense: she would have no reserves from her lover, and confesses her entire devotion to him". As he read through Julia's letters to Herbert after her death, Leslie had misgivings in comparing "the strength of her passion" at this stage of her life to her later marriage to himself.
  The Duckworths lived at 38 Bryanston Square (see images of exterior and interiors), Marylebone, London, a townhouse belonging to the Duckworth family, and the following year, their first child was born on 5 March 1868. Two other children followed in quick succession. Their third child, Gerald Duckworth, was born six weeks after his father's premature death in September 1870, at the age of 37, from an undiagnosed internal abscess. He was said to be reaching for a fig for her, while they were visiting Julia's sister (now Adeline Vaughan) at Upton Castle, New Milford, Pembrokeshire, when it ruptured. Within twenty-four hours, he was dead.
  Julia and Herbert Duckworth had three children;
  George (5 March 1868 – 1934), a senior civil servant
  Stella (30 May 1869 – 1897), died aged 28
  Gerald (29 October 1870 – 1937), founder of Duckworth Publishing.
caption: Julia Duckworth c. 1870
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