JANE ROBINSON’s biography of the Victorian artist and activist Barbara Bodichon is a lively and wide-ranging account of a woman who, in her own words, had “a great deal to say about work and life”. Barbara was a close friend of the novelist Marian Evans, better known as George Eliot. For Evans, Barbara was “a little draught of pure air”. And there is more than a hint of Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, in the accounts of Barbara’s desire to travel, to educate, to encourage. They are both beautiful women, unconventional and “bright with the light of dawn”.

Barbara was born in 1827 into a Unitarian family with a well-established record of campaigning against inequality; her grandfather worked with Wilberforce to outlaw the slave trade. But she was illegitimate, and so she was reluctant to put her name publicly to the crusades that she set in motion. Barbara’s awkward social position made her, as Elizabeth Gaskell said, “a strong fighter against the established opinion of the world”. She recognised the value of people and relationships that did not conform to Victorian expectations. As she explained to Marian Evans, “I know all love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways.”

Her own marriage to Dr Eugène Bodichon unsettled her friends and family. He was a brilliant but implacable social commentator, who would startle their guests in Algiers or Sussex by wandering naked around the house. When told of their engagement, one of his friends wrote that “a commonplace woman would be very unhappy with the doctor, and would not know how to guide his curious nature.”

Barbara was no commonplace woman. Robinson’s biography opens in 1866 with Barbara’s preparing a massive scroll of signatures: the first petition to Parliament asking for votes for women. In her early twenties, she is writing against “the absurdity of the present laws of marriage and divorce. . . there never was a tyranny so deeply felt yet borne silently.” She then turns her attention to girls’ education, establishing a school in London, and helping to found Girton College, Cambridge.

She sees the potential in young Hertha Ayrton (née Marks), who, with Barbara’s help, becomes a pioneering electrical engineer and suffragist. Her own paintings are widely exhibited, and the money that she earns from their sales helps to fund her philanthropic projects. She encourages Elizabeth Siddall and Gertrude Jekyll to pursue their art. Barbara’s house, Scalands, is filled with writers, painters, and agitators, who sign their names on the bricks in the hearth: Bessie Rayner Parkes, Emily Davies, Marianne North, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Jane and William Morris. It is a roll-call of radicals and visionaries.

AlamyWatercolour (1861) from a sketchbook of Barbara Bodichon

The subtitle of this biography — The first feminist — rightly places Barbara in the vanguard of change. On every page, however, we see the networks of women and men who came together to challenge the status quo. This in some ways is the most exciting element of the story: how many other women were daring to speak out, to act. Barbara was the galvanising element. She established and reinforced the mechanisms that drove far-reaching action: committees, journals, debating clubs, colleges, musical parties, painting expeditions, friendships.

Barbara’s multi-faceted life has been brought into focus thanks to Robinson’s thorough research. Robinson’s enjoyment of the process shines through, as she reveals the letters and watercolours in the family archives, and her spirited text is supported by footnotes and a useful bibliography. Barbara’s experience can help us to reframe our expectations of Victorian women. Her enthusiasm for life is still appealing today. She described herself as “one of the cracked people of the world”. She found her place among “democrats, socialists, artists, poor devils or angels”. As she said, “I want to see what sort of world this God’s world is.”

Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper is a cultural historian with an interest in Victorian and 20th-century Britain.

Trailblazer: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: The first feminist to change our world
Jane Robinson
Doubleday £25
(978-0-85752-777-6)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50