Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon

Nov 16, 2024 4:37 PM

Author:Pam Hirsch

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was the most unconventional and influential leader of the Victorian women's movement. Enormously talented, energetic and original, she was a feminist, law-reformer, painter, journalist, the close friend of George Eliot and a cousin of Florence Nightingale. As a painter, Barbara is now recognised as a vital figure among Pre-Raphaelite women artists. As a feminist she led four great campaigns: for married women's legal status, for the right to work, the right to vote and to education. Making brilliant use of unpublished journals and letters, Pam Hirsch has written a biography that is as lively and powerful as its subject, recreating the woman in all her moods, and placing her firmly in the context of women's struggle for equality.

Reviews

His account is as gripping a tale of scholarly detection and discovery as one could hope to find

—— Margaret Drabble , Observer

Bernal makes an exotic interloper in Classical studies. He comes to them with two outstanding gifts: a remarkable flair for the sociology – perhaps one should say politics – of knowledge, and a formidable linguistic proficiency… The ‘fabrication’ of Ancient Greece…will never pass as a natural identity again

—— Guardian

The value of the book lies in his massive and meticulous demonstration of how scholarly views of the past are moulded (and repeatedly modified) by the changing political environment in which scholars pass their lives... Black Athena is certainly a stimulus to thought

—— London Review of Books

Has the virtues of force, clarity, wealth of ideas and a voracious intellectual curiosity

—— Times Higher Educational Supplement

A swashbuckling foray into the very heart of racist, Eurocentric historiography... Already one can hear the knives being sharpened against Bernal

—— City Limits

Popular history in the best sense...its attention to human detail and its commanding prose call to mind the best work of Barbara Tuchman

—— Washington Post

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