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Jane Robinson

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9/9/2020

Wild Barbara


I'd like to tell you a little bit about the subject of a major biography I'm working on at the minute. Regular readers will recognise her: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon has cropped up cheerfully throughout my career. Now I have a chance to explore just what an unusual and influential woman she was. The portrait below, by Emily Osborn, does her no particular favours, but I think you get a sense of her strength of spirit. She called herself 'wild', 'one of the cracked people of the world', on a life-long quest for truth, beauty and most of all, for justice. 
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I can reel off plenty of interesting facts about her: she was illegitimate (which is why her cousin Florence Nightingale refused to acknowledge her); independently wealthy; a professional water-colourist; an intrepid traveller; was involved in founding the first women's suffrage society and the first university college for women in England (Girton, Cambridge); changed the legislation preventing married women from owning their own property; campaigned for women to be allowed into the professions; opened one of the country's first co-educational schools for inner-city children; refused to wear stays; lived half the year with her eccentric French husband in Algeria, etc. etc..

But what really sets her story apart is love. She was at the centre of an adoring and eclectic circle of friends, including George Eliot, the Brownings, John Chapman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Lizzie Siddal, Gertrude Jekyll, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Millicent Fawcett - and so on and so on. All of them described Barbara as warm-hearted - 'lion-hearted', even; boundlessly generous, and kind. 

Those were her celebrity friends; countless working-class people had Barbara to thank for education, physical well-being, financial and moral support. Barbara was a phenomenon; the most modern woman of the Victorian age, and I cannot wait to tell her story.  

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In other news: I'm incredibly honoured to have been invited by the Hawthornden Trust to spend time in Italy working on the Bodichon biography. This is not a tranquil time for any of us, and I must admit I'm apprehensive about the journey, having hardly left home for six months, but it's such a privilege. I can't say no to the opportunity for peace, quiet, and writerly sympathy. Bring it on.

Soon after my return in October, a documentary about Mary Seacole is due to be aired by ITV. I spent a morning filming with the incomparable Alison Hammond and am much looking forward to the result. I'll let you know the date on Twitter.

And finally, Captain Oates sends his love. He has spent lockdown doing an awful lot of thinking, and is therefore having a(nother) quick snooze, otherwise he'd be here at our desk as usual. Sweet dreams.



Silver linings from the desk of Captain Oates

2/4/2020

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As I write, if I turn to my left, ignoring the cat staring out of the window, I can look straight onto ye olde Englishe village green. There’s an elderly gentleman creaking by on a bike that obviously hasn’t seen the light of day for years. Two children and their mother are walking towards me; the woman tight-lipped and tired; the children dressed as Batman and Snow White. There are a couple of Aylesbury ducks chasing each-other around the pond in the distance. But apart from that: nothing. I can usually see and hear trains and planes as well as cars. Nothing.

Except – and here’s where I open my CORVID-19 diary – jackdaws, crows and red kites. I know red kites aren’t corvids, but I can’t leave them out. Their cry is incongruously weak and whiny; I can’t usually hear it above the sound of every-day traffic. But on warm days especially, when they wheel around in thermals (not long-johns, the other kind), they fill the air with sound.

The jackdaws are nesting in a disused chimney a few feet away from where I’m sitting now. They would be useless at self-isolation: they never stop chattering and bickering together, and constantly seek the company of others. And the crows are in a new-build rookery – hang on, crowery? – in some lime trees across the road. I love the sound of their cawing: it’s somehow timeless and comforting.

Learning to listen is a skill I’m developing fast. I can hear the sound of tea-leaves hitting a warmed-up teapot in the kitchen downstairs in defiance of a closed door and Captain Oates’s purring. I can hear the approaching footsteps of our brilliant postman as strides along, still jaunty, in his shivery shorts. I can hear the anxiety in the brittle-bright voice of a friend or family member online. And I can hear the voices of the women I write about every day.

I specialise in social history through women’s eyes. I like to acknowledge the people who have been working away behind the scenes of history to make life better. Women who campaigned long and hard – and peacefully – for a political voice; for access to higher education; for equal opportunities in the professional workplace; to be respected, dignified, and to be heard.

One thing all these campaigners shared was a sense of sisterhood. Solidarity. The heady knowledge that when you all reach a hand to others (metaphorically speaking), you are strong. When suffragists were being attacked by mobs with firebombs and rocks; would-be students were being told their brains were too small for serious thinking; the first doctors were assured that there would never be any need of them; their silver lining was the mutual support they discovered in adversity.
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That is a message worth listening to.  
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