Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon

08 April 1827 - 11 June 1891

Standard Name: Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith

Birth Name: Barbara Leigh Smith

Married Name: Barbara Bodichon

BLSB 's literary work emerged from her convictions as a feminist. Her accounts of women's political, legal, and educational disabilities (in lectures, pamphlets, and an important periodical) played a crucial role in mid-Victorian legal reform and the campaigns for improved employment and educational opportunities for women. She also published a travel diary.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
politics	George Eliot	GE was always ambivalent about the struggle for women's rights. This ambivalence may have been fed by the fact that her situation with Lewes made her peculiarly vulnerable to public attack of a personal flavour...
politics	Bessie Rayner Parkes	BRP was left in primary charge of the journal in 1859, when Barbara Leigh Smith (who had married three months after Parkes became editor) began to live outside England for half of the year. Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press, 1993. Because...
politics	Anna Brownell Jameson	ABJ became a mentor to a group of young reformers and educational pioneers, including Adelaide Procter , Emily Faithfull , and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon . She sometimes provided meeting space for the group, both...
politics	Jessie Boucherett	In 1859, along with Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Adelaide Procter , JB launched the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW). They held their first meeting on 19 June 1859. Stone, James S. Emily Faithfull: Victorian Champion of Women’s Rights. P. D. Meany, 1994. 232n1 Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2024, 22 vols. plus supplements. “Obituary: Miss Emilia Jessie Boucherett”. Times, 21 Oct. 1905, p. 8. Though all...
politics	Eleanor Rathbone	Like her patriotic colleagues Millicent Garrett Fawcett , Barbara Bodichon , and Ray Strachey , ER was a strong believer in women's fundamental responsibilities as citizens, in their commitment to improving the state despite misogynistic...
politics	Elizabeth Barrett Browning	EBB 's name headed the petition organised by Barbara Leigh Smith and the Married Women's Property Committee and presented to Parliament in December 1855 to lobby for reform to married women's property law: this made...
politics	Adelaide Procter	The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (for which AP , with Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and others, had opened an office) met for the first time. Thomas, Leesther. A Poetry of Deliverance with Tractarian Affinities: A Study of Adelaide A. Procter’s Poetry. Florida State University, 1994. 36
Publishing	Bessie Rayner Parkes	BRP and Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon) began writing for the Waverley Journal, by ladies for the cultivation of the memorable, the progressive and the beautiful, which in 1857 was succeeded by the English...
Publishing	Margaret Oliphant	Blackwood's published MO 's severe critique of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon 's Brief Summary . . . of the Laws Concerning Women. Greenfield, John R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 159. Gale Research, 1996. 159: 254
Reception	Bessie Rayner Parkes	Remembered mostly for her prose contributions to the early feminist movement, BRP also produced poetic creations which deserve not to be dismissed. (Her daughter credits her with admiring the poetry of Percy Shelley and more...
Reception	Matilda Hays	In a letter to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon in 1858, Bessie Rayner Parkes wrote that all goes on like clockwork at the office, under Max, who is the most methodical of workers, & brings all...
Reception	Christina Rossetti	This best-known poem has had myriad editions, often with illustrations, and generated a wide range of interpretation. It resonates powerfully with CR 's Anglicanism , and more particularly her experience at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary
Residence	Matilda Betham-Edwards	She had there a little house at one end of a picturesque terrace. When Helen C. Black visited her there, her upstairs study was furnished with a Moroccan carpet, pottery from Greece and other countries...
Textual Features	Matilda Betham-Edwards	She describes here her journey, with a female friend (actually Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon ), to Spain with the particular purpose of seeing the works of Velasquez , and on to North Africa, in the...
Textual Features	George Eliot	This story is equally remarkable for the portraits of Mr Tryan (the Evangelical clergyman who not only converts Janet to his beliefs but succeeds in sparking her will to regeneration) and of Janet herself, but...

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