"Julia Kavanagh has much in common with many women writers today. Although not considered a 'political writer' she was astutely aware of the double standards of her time. Her work bears testimony to the many anomalies and contradictions concerning women's subjectivity and as such she draws on the very core of sexual politics . . . she is concerned with women's experience and works they produced in a world which, for the most part, saw women as adjunctival to male experience. I would argue, nevertheless, that because she is writing about women who previously had each been seen only in relation to more 'historically illustrious men' Kavanagh offers a significant contribution to women's history."
- Eileen Fauset, from the Irish Journal of Feminist Studies

"We can commend Miss Kavanagh for the general ease, propriety and care with which her task has been executed . . . The amount of generous and wholesome effort thus disclosed is sufficient, in variety of scope and in success, to silence the most cynical of misogynists — unless he be henceforward prepared to accept the imputation of being unjust as well as cynical."

Henry Fothergill Chorley, "The Athenaeum" No. 1265 (January 24, 1852), 104-105.