Social historian Jane Robinson’s Biography of Barbara Leigh Bodichon, a victorian feminist we should all be grateful to, is as entertaining as it is necessary, in histories of the women’s movement,  and from the walls of Girton College, Cambridge, where she looks out, somewhat glossy-eyed. Bodichon was both one of the finest Victorian England’s finest female painters, exhibiting at London’s Royal Academy and formidable campaigner for women’s rights, and her achievements stayed under the radar, as she defied easy categorisation. Her pamphlet “A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Laws Concerning Women” was the beginning of a long effort to help women gain control of their lives, culminating in the 1992 Married Women’s Property Act. She found the Women’s Suffrage movement, and co-founded Girton College, Cambridge, the first of its kind.

She was born Barbara Leigh Smith in 1827, granddaughter of Whig Abolitionist William Smith daughter of Liberal parliamentarian Benjamin Smith, who was a radical as his father, if not more so. When Benjamin Smith fell in love with Anne Longed, a ravishingly pretty miller’s daughter, he has five children by her but never married to her. In Victorian England, “the Pater” as he was known, lived in the big house,  with Anne and the children in a “picture-book” cottage nearby.

Smith employed an ex-weaver  as a tutor who played the lute while the children danced. Smith’s ideas anticipate the 1960s. When they turned 21, he made 3 each of his children financially independent.  Bodichon was radical enough but free-spirited, with money of her own.

She wrote “ I am one of the cracked people of the world, and never happy in an English genteel family life”.  Connected to the establishment  – cousin to Florence Nightingale- illegitimacy put her outside it too. A fatal glitch, perhaps, but it enabled her to see the world with a penetrating eye. “Slavery is greater injustice”, she writes, on her honeymoon, in the US, “but it is allied to the injustice to women so closely that I cannot see one without thinking of the other…”

Her early life, with radical friend Bessie Parkes, makes exhilarating reading as they travel defiantly, joyously, unchaperoned to Europe, determined to carve out careers for themselves – controversial, for women of their class. Bodichon produced beautiful art, that was fluid and even fugitive in style.

She also married a French intellectual, Dr, Eugene Bodichon. The eccentric doctor was to be seen at dinner wearing a long garment of white flannel, “like a lady’s waterproof sack, with its blood”, the marriage became unhappy.

Name any modern human rights movement, and she was a pioneer: Feminism, equal opportunities, diversity, inclusion, mental health awareness, Black Lives Matter. While Bodichon’s name has been omitted from too many history books, it was Barbara that opened the doors for more famous names to walk through. And her influence owed as much to who she was as ti what she did people loved her for her robust sense of humour, cheerfulness and indiscriminate acts of kindness.

This book is a celebration of the life of the founder of Britain’s suffrage movement: Campaigner for equal opportunity in the workplace, the law, at the home and beyond Co-founder of Girton, the first University college for women, a committed activist for human rights, fervently anti-slavery.

Jane Robinson’s Trailblazer throws a light on a remarkable woman who lived on her own terms and to whom we owe a huge debt. Bodichon’ long reddish-gold hair was remembered by everyone who met her. She ditched Whalebone corsets and wore flowing clothes,. She had cheer and generosity, was never sanctimonious and didn’t judge. Her desire to help people, wherever they were from.

“One can imagine Barbara peeping from behind a distant tree at the time, like a delighted fairy godmother” Robinson writes, when Dante Gabriel Rossetti asks Lizzie Siddal to marry him.

Trailblazer:The First Feminist to Change Our World by Jane Robinson, Doubleday £25, 416 pages.