Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon is not a well-known name, even here in the UK. Yet, she was a nineteenth century pioneer, a trailblazer who supported feminism, equal opportunities, diversity, inclusion, mental health awareness, & opposed slavery, & the consigning of women to the home. Barbara was also artistic, she wrote, drew, & painted throughout her life & was friends with some of the most well-known names of the time including Marian Evans (George Eliot), Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, & Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

This was a well-written & meticulously researched book, & there's a lot of information packed within these pages but I found it a bit of a struggle to wade through at times. I'm not entirely sure why. I did find it worth reading though as it introduced me to names I had never heard of before (& I spent a bit of time looking them up), her unconventional upbringing was interesting, & it was especially nice to see my childhood home county (Derbyshire) mentioned several times. Overall, it was an informative read but something about it made it a bit of a slog at times. 3.5 stars (rounded down).

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Random House UK/Transworld Publishers/Doubleday, for the opportunity t0 read an ARC.

This was not for me and i'm unsure if it was the writing style or the topic.
Trailblazer seems to be about a women who maybe should known but who based on this reading only seems to have started a lot of things but never saw anything through. She seems to be someone who appears in lots of places but is this just because she knows lots of famous please? It seemed to me like a long list of all the things she sort of did but with lots of naming dropping along the way.
Not for me.

This book really does highlight a very important woman from history, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, who has been overshadowed by her more well known friends.

It looks at a time of change in relation to slavery, medicine, same sex relationships, and the start of the first wave of feminism.

It brilliantly shows how you can make history very accessible, for the person who doesn’t care for history to the most academic.

It is also a masterclass in how to marry social history to biographical research. This helps make you as the reader understand why Barbara is different and important.

This book should be on every history lovers bookshelf

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was quite a woman--suffragist, abolitionist, law reformer, co-founder of Girton College, artist, activist. She was Florence Nightingale's cousin and a dear friend of George Eliot and others whose names are well known today. But she is not that well known. Why? Jane Robinson considers some possibilities--the stigma of being a child of an unmarried couple, her unconventional upbringing and family life, both as a child and later as an adult, her eccentricities, her lifestyle. Whatever the reasons, this book is a welcome remedy to the lack of knowledge about this remarkable woman and all she accomplished, both at a societal and personal level. As both a biographer and a social historian, Robinson looks at Bodichon's life through both lenses and writes a compelling, enjoyable, informative biography. She does a fine job of giving readers a sense of who Barbara Bodichon was, what shaped her, and what her world was like, even with limited resources. There simply isn't as much information about her as there is for some other activist women of the time. This is partly because Bodichon herself was intensely private in some ways. In places, Robinson adds some of her own speculation and paraphrased random quotes, but she is always very clear about explaining why and where she is doing this and this adds to the narrative in my view.

I loved this book. It's a great read and an important contribution to women's social history. I learned a lot and came away with some things to think about. Highly recommend.