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Henrietta Emma Litchfield (née Darwin; 25 September 1843 – 17 December 1927) was a daughter of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood. Henrietta was born at Down House, Downe, Kent, in 1843.
During 1913 he married his third wife Florence Henrietta Darwin (née Fisher); there were no children of this marriage, but he became step-father to Fredegond Shove née Maitland and Ermengard Maitland.
Though far less recognised by Victorian society for her intellectual worth than her father or brothers, Henrietta was an essential lynchpin in the Darwin circle, and helped anchor both the scientific and domestic activities of her family.
Written over the period March to July 1871, the year of the twenty-eight-year-old Henrietta’s sudden marriage to a man she had known for less than three months, the journal introduces a confident, intelligent, reflective, and passionate young woman. The full text of the diary is included in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 19: 1871.
Henrietta Darwin’s Diary: The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Part Two. In June 1871 Henrietta met Richard Buckley Litchfield, a barrister and lecturer in music at the London Working Men’s College; they were married in the parish church in her parents’ village of Downe, Kent, on 31 August.
Charles Darwin’s iconic ‘Tree of Life’ sketch – which was stolen and then returned to Cambridge University Library more than two decades after its disappearance – will go on public display for the first time this century in a major new exhibition opening on Saturday, July 9.
In a rare glimpse into the intellectual life of the women in Darwin’s circle, Henrietta reflects in her diary on a wide-ranging debate with one of her cousins, Frances Julia Wedgwood (known to the family as Snow), on free will, good and evil, and the possibility of eternal life.
