Julia Barrett was born on 21 October 1808, probably in Richmond, Surrey, the eldest of five children of Henry Barrett (1756–1843) and his wife, Charlotte, née Francis (1786–1870), the niece of Fanny Burney (Madame D."Arblay) who had first, rather drastically, edited her journals and letters.
Julia Barrett"s many admirers included Fanny Burney"s parson son Alexander d"Arblay, but she chose instead to marry a widower with children, James Thomas (died 1840) on 2 August 1836, to the disappointment of her family.
Sarah Burney wrote of them in her correspondence and regularly described Julia as a beauty. Julia made a full recovery in 1834. Thomas took her to India, where he was a judge in the Madras Presidency.
They moved to Rajahmundry in 1837, where they kept a boys" school.
Her son James Cambridge Thomas was born on 3 February 1839. After her husband"s death in 1840, Julia Thomas was remarried to Charles Maitland (1815–1866), a writer and Anglican curate of Lyndhurst, Hampshire in the New Forest, on 5 November 1842.
They had a daughter Julia Caroline (1843–1890). Julia Maitland"s first publication of note was her Letters from Madras, during the years 1836-1839, by a Lady published anonymously in 1843.
Controversially, it was strongly Christian.
She also set up a multilingual reading room and assisted in starting other schools nearby. The book ends with a plea for a national system of education in India, as the route to modernization: " If every civilian up the country were to have a poor little school like ours, it would do something in time." She also made strong efforts to learn local languages, helped with famine relief, and investigated and condemned the South Indian slave trade. These were both humorous and didactic, promoting politeness, benevolence and generosity.
She commented at the end of Cat and Dog, "I would propose Puss and Captain as an example of a new and better method of "Living Like Cat and Dog".".
