An American Diary 1857-8: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon

‘I am one of the cracked people of the world,’ Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon wrote of herself, ‘and I like to herd with the cracked … queer Americans, democrats, socialists, artists, poor devils or angels; and am never happy in an English genteel family life. I try to do it like other people, but I long always to be off on some wild adventure.’ Reformer, feminist, free-thinker, later to endow the founding of Girton College, Barbara Bodichon went to the United States on a marriage journey. First p