All alumni and friends are warmly invited to the 2024 Girton College annual Library event at 11am in the Stanley Library on Saturday 28 September.
To reserve a place at this talk please email alumni@girton.cam.ac.uk or call 01223 764935.
Trailblazer: the life and work of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon - co-founder of Girton - was one of the most intriguing of Victorian heroines: unconventional, illegitimate, yet at the centre of a luminous circle of influential Victorians. She was Florence Nightingale’s first cousin and George Eliot’s closest friend; the Rossetti family's confidante and Gertrude Jekyll's workmate; someone who opened many of the doors we walk through today with barely a backward glance. Look in the engine-room of every aspect of social change in Victorian Britain, and you’ll find her there. And look on the walls of art galleries here and in the States: her professional watercolours (as Girtonians know) are startling. Loving and beloved, Barbara was inspiring and remarkably modern: a role model for our times - and huge fun.
Jane Robinson is an acclaimed social historian, focusing on women pioneers. Born in Edinburgh, she was brought up in North Yorkshire and read English at Somerville College, Oxford. For ten years she worked in the antiquarian book trade before becoming a full-time writer and public speaker. She has written thirteen major books, including Hearts and Minds, looking at the hidden history of the fight for the vote; Bluestockings, the story of the first women to access higher education in Britain, and ground-breaking biographies of nurse Mary Seacole, social reformer and artist Barbara Bodichon, and the inspirational humanitarian Josephine Butler. Dubbed by the BBC ‘one of our most original and engaging social historians,’ Jane is a popular guest at literary festivals, and on national radio and television. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical and Royal Geographical Societies, a Hawthornden Fellow, a writing mentor, and a Senior Associate of Somerville College.