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Studies of two 19th-century champions of women’s rights, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Annie Besant, shine a light on the bohemian and ‘badass’ pioneers, even if the tone sometimes gratesWhile her name is an awful mouthful, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon remains something of a Zelig figure. Pick up almost any book about Victorian literary circles and she’ll be in it somewhere. You see her here, you see her there, this much-admired artist and co-founder of Girton College, Cambridge, this cousin of Florence Nightingale and friend of George Eliot. In as much as she sticks in the mind when your attention is really supposed to be elsewhere, she is a pleasing, bustling kind of figure: independent, cheery, rather bohemian for her time – and sharp, too. “Today came a letter from Barbara full of joy in my success, in the certainty that Adam Bede was mine, though she had not read more than extracts in Reviews,” wrote Eliot in her diary on 6 May 1859. Everyone else had assumed her novel was by a man, but Bodichon had recognised her dearest correspondent’s “great big head & heart & her wise wide views” in an instant.In Trailblazer, her new biography of Bodichon, Jane Robinson (Bluestockings, Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders) seeks to remedy her sidelining by putting her centre stage at last (though there have been other biographies); her theory is that her relative obscurity is the result only of her having blazed so many different trails. But while history is undoubtedly sniffy when it comes to all-rounders, especially those who are female, even Robinson seems to know that it is Bodichon’s friends and acquaintances who will be the draw for the contemporary reader. Her book begins, after all, with a sketch of a sunflower. At its heart, she has written Bodichon’s name; radiating outwards from its petals she has then drawn lines connecting her to everyone from Queen Victoria to Lord Tennyson and Emmeline Pankhurst. Continue reading...