The Nine Lives of Annie Besant E-Book

Clare Paterson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 451

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

On Thursday, 5 April 1877, police charged 30-year-old Annie Besant and her colleague Charles Bradlaugh with breaching the Obscene Publications Act 1857. The reason was the scandalous sale of a slim book called The Fruits of Philosophy – a book that advocated for birth control in an era when parents were encouraged to keep their daughters ignorant and fearful. The publication of this guide, which the prosecutor in the trial referred to as a 'dirty, filthy book', made Annie famous. But this was not Annie's first or last battle against Victorian social mores. She was a good Christian wife who became an atheist; a liberal campaigner who became a prominent socialist activist in the strikes and protests of the 1880s; a Theosophical High Priestess who became heavily involved in the Indian nationalist movement. Viewed as a dangerous threat to imperial government and authority, she was a fearless and formidable freedom fighter. Annie Besant lived an extraordinary and inspiring life, and yet because of her complexities and seeming contradictions, she has been sidelined by history. From politics to the occult, from Christianity to Theosophy and from the London suburbs to a pyre on the banks of an Indian river, The Nine Lives of Annie Besant tells the complete story of a woman who broke all the rules.

Leseprobe

First published 2025

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© Clare Paterson, 2025

The right of Clare Paterson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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CONTENTS

Preface

First Life:     Christian Wife

Second Life:     Pariah

Third Life:     Birth Controller

Fourth Life:     Socialist Activist

Fifth Life:     Trade Unionist

Sixth Life:     Occult Initiate

Seventh Life:     High Priestess

Eighth Life:     Spiritual Mother

Ninth Life:     Politician

Afterlife

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

PREFACE

‘One of the outstanding events in my life is the day when I first met Annie Besant.’

Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, 1947.

In Delhi in November 1917, Mr Sempkins, Officer on Special Duty in the Criminal Intelligence Department, stamped TOP SECRET in red ink on a manila file on his desk. It contained a typed report, ready to be sent to London, about the subject of his investigation, who inspired significant nervousness among politicians. His was a near-impossible task, charged as he was with reviewing his subject’s life so far and evaluating the danger they now posed to government in London and Delhi. The potential threat was not a terrorist or a warlord, but a diminutive, white-haired lady who had just celebrated her seventieth birthday. Annie Besant was not much over 5ft in her socks, but she made men of rank across two continents quake in their boots.

The joy today of reading Sempkins’ thirty-six-page report, which is buried deep in the ocean of paperwork of the old India Office in the British Library, is the pleasure of looking across a life and seeing its twists and turns.1 With Annie, those changes were magnified into rollercoaster rides and the direction of travel could only be appreciated after the event. Every decade was tumultuous. If you drew her life as a line it would be a series of zigzags, and if it were a weather map, there would never be a dull day. It would show fog and bright sunshine, heavy banks of rain clouds and shards of bright light.

Sempkins and his readers in the upper echelons of government in London and India were well aware of the basic facts. His subject started out as an ordinary middle-class girl, intelligent, inquisitive, intellectual and very religious. She married a clergyman and promptly lost her faith. She refused to be the model of a Victorian wife and mother, became an atheist and morphed into an activist and a thorn in the side of power. One of the best-known women in the country, she was the defendant in a sensational obscenity case and then the spark that lit the match workers’ strike in east London. A socialist, she delivered speeches to huge crowds, wrote prolifically, courted controversy, and then, perhaps most remarkably of all, in middle age, embraced the occult. At this point, the subject of the report appeared to abandon all previous beliefs as well as her homeland. Her new mother country was India and in her twenty-four years there to date, she had stirred up even more trouble than she had at home.

As Sempkins sat in his Delhi office reviewing his subject’s story, he concluded that she adopted different causes like new sets of clothes, and he could not refrain from moving from objective fact to his own commentary. He freely admitted she was the most fantastic orator, and her speechmaking and control of public crowds were brilliant, but he could not deal with her hairpin turns. He called them her ‘violent changes’,2 which made it sound as though they were accompanied by aggressive mood swings (they were not). ‘The main characteristic of this remarkable lady,’ he wrote, ‘is her ill-balanced enthusiasm which frequently leads her into gross inconsistencies. She is also inordinately self-opinionated.’3 He might well have added ‘for a woman’. This person was, according to this analysis, deluded, pathetically enthusiastic and repeatedly wrong.

Sempkins was in accord with many of those who have since written about Annie Besant, especially when it came to her conversion to the esoteric movement of Theosophy, which the official called ‘the most sudden of all her changes’.4 This new, occult religious system was the work of a Russian mystic, and was influenced by a brotherhood of adepts known as the Masters, or Mahatmas. Theosophists held that there was a deeper reality beyond the known world. The eastern-inspired belief system had spread across continents and was now led by Annie. (I use her first name. She was called many things, from Chief to Mother, but in the East End of London she was simply known as Annie.) Annie’s transition from political firebrand to religious disciple and occult practitioner is what, for many commentators since, constituted her downfall and the reason for relegating her to the margins of history. Up to that point, they say she was a marvel. She was a woman in a man’s world, fighting for compassion for the poor and social justice for all. Indeed, her contribution to politics and society was impressive enough to justify her place in our pantheon of change-makers in the nineteenth century. If only she had stopped there, the argument goes, or stuck with a single cause, she could have been a heroine, but instead she got religion and, worse still, she embraced magic. She has been treated in a pick ‘n’ mix way by biographers who have selected the persona they like and shut their eyes to the uncomfortable pieces that, in their view, do not fit the whole picture.

In many respects, the time when Sempkins was making his assessment was the most remarkable phase of Annie Besant’s life. It was another cycle of reinvention and a new form of her activism to find the truth and make a better world. As Theosophical leader, she had a global role from London to Sydney. She practised her occult skills, and asked her gurus or Masters to tell her what to do, and they sent her magical messages instructing her to tackle politics in India. At a time when the whole imperial relationship was being interrogated, she became a fervent home rule activist and, surprisingly as a foreign woman, the figurehead of the nationalist campaign.

That was the problem that Sempkins was asked to consider in November 1917. In the previous twelve months, Annie had caused inordinate problems for politicians, east and west. She was discussed in parliament in London, and written about almost obsessively by newspapers in India and Britain. She was banned, censored, sued and locked up. Britain was at war, there were mass casualties in the trenches, and the balance of power between the old Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe was at risk. Britain’s imperial role was teetering. One elderly lady who should have been at home with her feet up in front of the fire only had to open her mouth to make people rally round. She was a political loose cannon, and an uncontrollable force of nature. What is more, Annie had just been elected president of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. She had a huge base among nationalists as well as among Theosophists, the sort of support that is every politician’s dream.

This formidable woman now at the centre of the imperial picture was refusing to toe the government line. She was in an extraordinary position of power as president of both a new world religion and of the mainspring of Indian nationalism. Sempkins noted that ‘it is apparent […] that Mrs. Besant intends to make her year of office a period of the most strenuous political agitation’.5 This was not the conclusion anyone in the London or Delhi government offices wanted to hear. Moreover, this sari-clad, white septuagenarian did not conveniently fit any box, which made her hard to get the measure of. She had many strings to her bow and each time she attacked her chosen target with complete commitment, making her a model of can-do activism. She had galvanising enthusiasm and the appeal of an evangelist, and yet she was a Victorian woman active in a period well before British women had the vote. No wonder she caused consternation. I imagine Sempkins sealing up his file of bad news in a buff envelope, handing it to his secretary, and anticipating the horrified reactions from his political masters to more trouble ahead. Meanwhile, Annie would be receiving occult visions and strength from her mystic Masters.

Her exploits through the years shone a light on many contemporary controversies. When Sempkins detailed her rebellious activities in his report, I suspect as much in awe as in frustration, he said that ‘the perpetual struggle of the violent reformer against constitutional authority continued’. Indeed he thought it had not only continued but escalated. Critics past and present accuse Annie Besant of inconsistency, but she was always a rebel, with numerous causes. Theosophists taught that living things were reincarnated after death, but Annie did not wait for death to renew her. She renewed herself. She was busy pursuing truth and social justice all her days and to achieve her ends she frequently changed her means. In 1960, biographer Arthur Nethercot wrote The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, about her time as a social reformer, which was followed by another volume, The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant, about what he saw as her distinct change of direction with Theosophy. I see her life as more of a piece, and her choices as more developmental and harmonious. I picture Annie from oppressed housewife to Theosophical president, and see how, in order to be true to her values, she reimagined herself nine times within one lifetime.

Unlike Sempkins, I am not limited to assessing her priority as a danger to the state. Untangling who she was nearly a century after her death requires squinting to catch traces of her ghostly image talking to her ethereal Masters, and then opening my eyes wide to assimilate her torrent of evangelical words in print. What can we make of the fleeting appearances in the flesh of mystic gurus, or their curious handwritten messages to their followers? How do we account for her acceptance in India as a key proponent of nationalism, or her switch from atheism to mysticism? There are no statues to Annie in England and she is rarely celebrated for speaking truth to power against all the odds. People in the UK, if they know her at all, recall her as a social reformer or trade unionist. In India, she is still remembered with affection as a nationalist and home ruler. On Independence Day, even now, girls dress up in white saris and choose between being Indira Gandhi, Mother Theresa or Annie Besant. ‘Namaste,’ they say, impersonating her. ‘Though I am not Indian, my heart is Indian.’6

Annie had a plethora of contrasting experiences in so many different guises that she was like the proverbial cat, so I have awarded her nine lives. Cats were sacred in Ancient Egypt, as was the number nine. An Egyptian creation myth had gods and goddesses gathering and collaborating in groups of nine. Annie would have enjoyed the simile, with its roots in antiquity, its connection to divinity and the suggestion that the multiple lives were variations on a theme. Selecting only highlights from her multitude of deeds, however, does not demonstrate the path of determined activism that can be traced through it all. To have been Annie Besant in all her iterations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the militant to the esoteric, was a remarkable feat. She locked horns with those who had conventional views on, amongst other topics, religion, birth control, education, marriage, women, unionism, free speech, nationalism and divorce. She fascinated but discombobulated men. She was a formidable and fearless activist with targets from the corners of the empire to the home front. She was a rebel for her time.

FIRST LIFE

CHRISTIAN WIFE

‘Unmarried women of all ages suffer under comparatively few disabilities; it is marriage which brings with it the weight of injustice and of legal degradation.’

Annie Besant, 1882.1

Just before Christmas 1867, 20-year-old Annie Wood married Frank Besant at St Mary Magdalen Church in Hastings. She was fresh-faced and attractive, with powerful, deep brown eyes, high cheekbones and a tiny physique. The wedding was a ceremony in the house of God, and the sacrament of the established religion of the country mattered greatly to this very Christian bride. Marriage in the 1860s was also a serious business for a young woman as it sealed her life chances, her position in society, the source of her income and the controller of her body, liberty, future children and finances. As Annie walked down the aisle, she already knew she was making a big mistake.

The unhappy wife who emerged into the wintry sunlight that November was a very independent-minded young woman. Born on 1 October 1847, she had a rebel streak from the start. When she was still an infant, her nurse once left her lying in her cradle ‘in the full faith that she could not rise from the recumbent position’.2 Annie nevertheless succeeded in pulling herself up, ‘determined to show that she was capable of unexpected independence, and made a vigorous struggle to assume that upright position which is the prerogative of man’.3 She fell back down against the cradle’s iron fretwork and the nurse found her with blood streaming from a wound on her forehead. A muscle was damaged and for the rest of her life Annie could not raise one eyebrow, giving her a quizzical, even sardonic look, which later served her well when she delivered speeches.

The anecdote of her accident comes from the first of two autobiographical accounts that Annie wrote. The original, Autobiographical Sketches, was a colourful, entertaining chronicle published in 1885 when she was in her thirties and called herself an atheist. A substantially revised, more serious version called An Autobiography followed in 1893 after her conversion to the new belief system, Theosophy. Both accounts were suffused with her thinking about religion, although the second incorporated what we might call the supernatural. Questioning the nature of existence was a defining feature of her hugely varied and long life. Times were changing so fast and her life was so full, even before the end of the century, that she probably did not envisage how very premature both her autobiographies might soon become. After all, Annie was born into the Victorian world just ten years after the queen came to the throne and she died the year Hitler came to power.

Annie Wood was one of three children, one of whom died in childhood. Her father William Wood came from a prosperous background. His uncle Matthew became Lord Mayor of London and one of his cousins became Lord High Chancellor, while another became an MP. William Wood’s branch of the family fared less well. He was too much of a dilettante and philosopher to succeed. He trained in medicine and worked in business and was deeply religiously sceptical, and came to an unfortunate end when Annie was just 5. Still fascinated by medicine, he often shadowed doctors on their rounds. One day in the summer of 1852 he was assisting in the dissection of the corpse of a man who had died of consumption and he cut his finger on the dead man’s breastbone. The infection he picked up was serious enough for one friend to suggest the amputation of his inflamed finger, but another said it would improve. It did not. By October he had galloping consumption and when the end drew near, his wife Emily called for a Roman Catholic priest to deliver the last rites. William’s thinking had outgrown the current orthodoxy, so he sent the priest packing.4

Emily was so distressed by William’s death that we are told her hair turned white overnight. The family decided it would do her no good to attend the funeral and young Annie was instructed to stay home to keep her mother company. Emily lay vacant-eyed on the sofa, following the service in her mind. Suddenly, and without any communication from those attending, she cried, ‘It is all over!’ and fainted.5 A few weeks later she made her way to Kensal Green Cemetery in North London to see her husband’s grave but neither she, nor the friends accompanying her, had any idea where to find it. One went off to get help from an attendant. Meanwhile, Emily had her own way of doing things. ‘If you take me to the chapel where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave,’ she announced.6 Despite it being some distance from the building and there being no marker, she led the visitors straight to the right plot. Annie was perplexed by how Emily did it. In her earlier account of events, before her conversion to Theosophy, she described it as a ‘curious psychological problem which has often puzzled me’.7

In 1893, after she had become a Theosophist, Annie felt sure that her mother’s response to William’s death and her alleged psychic ability to find his grave were early proof of sensitivity to spiritual events, which she called ‘ultra-physical capacity’.8 What had happened was now quite understandable. ‘With my present knowledge the matter is simple enough,’ she mused, dismissing her earlier confusion, ‘for I now know that the consciousness can leave the body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning, impress on the physical brain what it has experienced.’9

This recollection came with a spiritual glow, since her mother, she believed, had made a psychic link with her dead husband. Writing at a moment when Victorian society was obsessed with spiritualism, she saw these events as a sign of her own innate abilities. The fashion for communicating with the dead did not arrive in Britain until the second half of the nineteenth century. Stories about the Fox sisters hearing strange rapping noises in the woods of Connecticut in April 1848 then began to haunt British dining rooms. An American medium trailed the way with one-guinea-a-head séances in London a few years later and by the end of the century British society was awash with ghosts.10 From Queen Victoria’s palaces to the lowliest terraces, society was fascinated by the supernatural, but when Emily Wood contacted her dead husband mid-century, she was in the advance guard.

Annie was convinced that just as physical nature was inherited from one’s parents, so too was sensitivity to psychic impressions. She believed she was the lucky recipient of these skills, although they remained dormant for many years. Before that discovery, she grew up within the Christian framework that permeated Victorian society and which provided the moral principles that were thought essential for regulating behaviour. Annie’s studying soon evolved into obsessive religious commitment at which her father would have been aghast and which made her mother uncomfortable.

The Woods lived in London and when Annie’s father died in 1852, the family was surprised to find they had been left in penury and were forced to move from a house in St John’s Wood into lodgings above a grocer’s shop in Clapham in South London. Wealthy benevolent relatives offered to take Annie’s older brother under their wing, send him to a city school and from there shepherd him into business. On his deathbed, William had said he wanted their son to go into the ‘learned professions’ and become a ‘University man’.11 Emily resolved that the boy would have a private education and, to secure his tuition, set about procuring herself a job running a boarding house at Harrow School. The family moved there a few months later. As a girl, Annie’s education was not a priority, and no rich relatives rushed to help. There were no deathbed wishes about her career. Victorian girls did not usually require much schooling. What would they be educated for? They had no role in society beyond becoming wife and mother.

Annie’s prospects changed when she was eight and had a chance encounter with an elderly spinster in Harrow. Miss Marryat was the sister of novelist Captain Marryat, who had written the popular novel The Children of the New Forest in 1847, the year Annie was born. Defying current orthodoxy, Miss Marryat clearly did believe in the education of girls, and chose to teach children who would benefit from a free education. Auntie, as her pupils called her, proposed whisking 8-year-old Annie away each term-time to her Dorset home, along with a group of other students, to provide her with a wide-ranging education. Emily Wood at first refused to be parted from her beloved daughter but eventually yielded to the offer.

Miss Marryat, ‘a maiden lady of large means’,12 was an excellent teacher of an evangelical bent and her students learned music, languages and Latin grammar. Annie credits her with giving her a love of learning. The new pupil distinguished herself reciting the sonorous cadences of the Old and New Testaments but often worried that this for her was too easy a skill: ‘I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared with the vigorous “sense of sin” spoken of by the preachers.’13 When she was asked to pray aloud, something she initially dreaded, she did so with pride and aplomb, and secretly hoped that God would notice how neatly she said her prayers. Her words were easily clothed in balanced sentences, a sign of her oratorical skills which were to blossom later.

Tales of the sufferings of the early Christian martyrs were also lapped up by the girl who described herself as ‘light-hearted but serious-brained’.14 Many hours were spent daydreaming that she stood before Roman judges or Dominican inquisitors, and was flung to lions, tortured on the rack and burned at the stake. She fasted, used the sign of the cross, went to weekly communion and had grandiose ideas about her own future role. ‘I saw myself preaching some great new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were converted, and I became a great religious leader.’15 She even admitted she used to fret that she was born too late, when all the grand things had been done, and ‘when no suffering for religion was practicable’.16 Annie’s ambitious imagination and her desire for martyrdom took root very early. As she grew into adulthood, her daydreams did not turn to boys. Instead they continued to be filled with broodings over the days when young martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs, ‘when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia’s raptured ear’.17 In his Criminal Intelligence Department report on her, Mr Sempkins described the junior Annie’s chief characteristic as ‘a rather morbid religious tendency’.18

In her memoirs Annie wrote, ‘I cannot remember a time when a book was not a delight.’19 She could have tried Wilkie Collins’ mysteries or Jane Austen’s novels, about keeping up appearances in society and finding the right marriage match, but these were not the stories she was eager to consume. Her mother had a horror of sentimentality in girls and banned romances, including those by the prodigious novelists Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood.20 Instead, Annie devoured Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic poem about the fall of man, and she passed many a happy hour attempting to personify her favourite character, Satan. Lost in ecstasy, she declaimed hundreds of lines from it by heart. When she discovered that the devil was no horned and hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, she always hoped that Jesus, her ideal prince, would save him in the end.21 Any thoughts of romance centred around the Son of God.

Annie had two loves in her early life, of which one was Jesus. The other was her mother, ‘the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women’.22 After finishing her education with Miss Marryat, 15-year-old Annie moved back home to Harrow. With her long hair often tied up in a black silk net, and a lace collar fastened at her throat with a brooch containing a lock of her father’s hair,23 she enjoyed her life and studies in the company of her mild mother. It was, she says, a peaceful home life, ‘where all religious enthusiasm was regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming’.24 Nevertheless, she took things to extremes, fasted (much to her mother’s disapproval) and even self-flagellated.25 The centre of her devotion ‘with its ecstatic meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the divine’26 was weekly communion. She wanted to serve Christ and prove her love by sacrifice, ‘and turn my passionate gratitude into active service.’27

The self-portrait Annie produces in her memoir, when she looks back from the age of 38, is of an emotionally tortured, exceptionally bright teenager who centred her world and her desires on a passionate relationship with Christ. She was given opportunities to travel. Miss Marryat took her across Europe for a year, but the best part of the trip was not seeing the cultural highlights, but being confirmed by a visiting bishop. She was always pious and studious, but she recognised that ‘from the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my character’.28 Perhaps if her scientist father had lived longer and been more of an influence on his daughter’s implacable curiosity, Annie would have emerged differently. As it was, she recognised that her excesses simply bemused her surviving parent. ‘To my dear mother this type of religious thought was revolting,’ Annie confessed.29

At Easter 1866 Annie was decorating a local mission church in Clapham with flowers. There she encountered a young man just out of Cambridge who had taken orders, Reverend Frank Besant. It was a brief meeting and he did not make a particular impression on her. They were thrown together again the next summer when they were both part of a group of holidaymakers for a week at the south coast seaside resort of St Leonard’s. As the only young ones present, they were natural companions. He would surely have been struck by gloriously good-looking Annie with her auburn hair neatly parted in the middle, and dressed in a full-bustled gown with a high collar and delicate buttons. Shortly before he left, Frank asked Annie to marry him, assuming she would consent. It was not such a ridiculous assumption for him to have made, she admits. Girls were accustomed to look at all men as possible husbands and at the time Annie was clueless about courting etiquette and had mistakenly allowed him ‘full companionship’.30

The proposal startled Annie, and she felt terrible in case Frank or others assumed she had been flirting. She was stumped and hesitated. Frank had to run to catch a train, and he took her silence as acquiescence and bound her to secrecy until he could ask her mother’s permission. He then promptly disappeared. ‘The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy one of my life,’ she reported miserably.31 Annie consequently found herself engaged to a man she did not even pretend to love. Her adoring mother, however, placed a high value on appropriate behaviour. According to her thinking, disgrace was an unforgiveable sin and ‘a gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run into debt; she might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face’.32 Honour was at stake. ‘Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry?’33

Frank seemed to lack merit in every respect. In Annie’s memoirs, he is not referred to as good-looking, thoughtful or funny. Even the hint of mutual attraction is absent. She describes him simply as ‘a young Cambridge man’.34 Decades later his son recorded that Frank had achieved first-class honours in the mathematical examination and was ranked twenty-eighth in his year.35 History has not left us Frank’s side of the story, but judging from his marriage proposal and its aftermath, he seems to have been a man singularly lacking in emotional intelligence. Frank was one of five siblings and Annie would almost certainly have got on better with his older brother, Walter Besant, who was a scholar and secretary to the Palestine Exploration Fund. He would become a successful and prolific novelist and campaigner for authors’ rights. He was also an ‘engaged and energetic organizer and an instinctive reformer’.36 He, however, would categorically not have wanted Annie as a wife, and in years to come her notorious lifestyle and strident opinions would continue to prove an embarrassment to the Besant family.

As well as accidentally getting engaged to an unsuitable man that Easter, Annie also recognised, and conquered, her first theological uncertainty. She was upset by the contradictions in the four gospels. Why did they not align with one another? In the mid-nineteenth century, many of the most devout believers studied the Bible viewing it as historical truth. Meticulously, Annie laid out the facts stated in the gospels expecting authentic and matching testimonies. ‘Judge, then,’ she wrote, ‘of my terror at my own results when I found myself betrayed into writing down some contradictions from the Bible.’37 The shock of doubt was only momentary and she viewed it as a test of faith. She shuddered at her own ignorance, and ‘shrank back horrified and penitent’.38 As punishment, she imposed an extra fast on herself.

Six years later, in 1872, the novelist George Eliot published her epic provincial saga Middlemarch, in which the narrator introduces the very clever 19-year-old Dorothea, a handsome woman with good prospects, which the narrator says could only be jeopardised by ‘her love of extremes’.39 She was the kind of woman who ‘prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles – who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books!’.40 Annie might well have recognised a reflection of herself in the fictional protagonist’s stubborn streak and passion for religious learning. Many Victorians were obsessed with theology and the questions it raised in the newly industrialised world. Dorothea chose to marry her suitor, the priest Mr Casaubon, because she wanted to learn from him and admired his erudition. In real life, 20-year-old Annie saw less to like in her beau.

Her passive acceptance of Frank was at the opposite end of the emotional scale from her passion for Jesus. There was, nevertheless, an aura about priests, and they were idealised as special messengers of Christ. ‘Viewed in that way, the position of the priest’s wife seems second only to that of the nun, and has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness,’41 she reflected. Priests were half-angelic figures with lives consecrated to heaven, so Annie consoled herself by thinking about doing good works as a vicar’s wife. In retrospect, it was apparent to her that from the start it was never going to end well. She looked back with a feeling of ‘profound pity for the girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams, so unfitted for the role of wife’.42 All the seeds of a disaster were sown: a misunderstanding, an ill-placed sense of obligation, an obsession with religion and the yearning for a perfect marriage. Plus, there was a total lack of attraction to her fiancé and complete ignorance of sex. What could go wrong?

While waiting for the fate that she did not seem able to resist, Annie accompanied her mother that autumn to see family friends in Manchester. Here she had a formative experience.43 Their host, a solicitor called William Roberts, known locally as ‘the poor man’s lawyer’.44 was assisting at the trial of the ‘Manchester Martyrs’. Annie sat in on the court hearing. Two Irish Fenians, supporters of a future Irish republic, had been arrested in the city, which had a significant Irish population. The men were charged with sedition. When they were driven by horse-drawn carriage between the gaol and the courthouse, a large Fenian raiding party ambushed them in an effort to free the prisoners. One man shot at the lock on the door and in so doing accidentally killed the police constable inside. The shooter and one other successfully fled the scene, but dozens of others were arrested and charged. Twenty-six Irishmen were tried and five of them found guilty of murder, on the basis of joint enterprise. Three were sentenced to death by hanging. Annie cried at the news. She had found the trial a harrowing experience, and it was here, for the first time, that the cause of Irish nationalism hit home and that she was conscious of social injustice.

The outraged Times called for ‘stern and decisive repression’.45 but Annie disagreed. ‘The verdict was a foregone conclusion,’ she wrote in fury.46 She witnessed angry crowds, prejudice and heartbroken wives. She was young and knew little of politics or the law, but Lawyer Roberts was her first tutor in radicalism. Both her parents had Irish heritage and Annie wished she had not been born in London ‘when three quarters of my blood and all my heart are Irish’.47 Thanks to Roberts, the causes of Irish nationalism and of standing up for the disadvantaged were planted in her. When she returned to London, it seems unlikely she discussed the case or her deep feelings about it with her fiancé.

Any husband-to-be worth his salt would surely have seen that this remarkable, intense recipient of his favours was not passive or domestic, but intellectual and resolute. Perhaps Annie was too unusual a woman at this time for Frank to be able to envisage just how different she was. For her, marriage remained a religious duty and expectation, and besides, her mother had told her she had to go ahead with it, so she would be a vicar’s wife. As newspaper editor W.T. Stead later wrote, ‘She could not be the bride of Heaven, and therefore became the bride of Mr. Frank Besant. He was hardly an adequate substitute.’48

Their wedding night was a disaster. Looking back on the event years later, Annie was utterly, hopelessly ignorant of what marriage meant. Her life before the wedding was structured by religious study and the love of her mother, who had wrapped her in cotton wool and saved her from anxiety. Her mother had also shielded her from any understanding of sex and Annie had, she admitted, no more idea than a 4-year-old. There were books that described sexual intercourse, which Annie’s mother could have shared with her. One such was Aristotle’s Masterpiece, an out-of-date sex and midwifery guide, which may have been harder to get hold of since the passing of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857. Books about sex were off-limits in most Victorian homes, and Annie’s anguish and retrospective self-pity suggest she did not have the opportunity to read any. The closest she ever came to criticising her mother was when she wrote that ‘no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck under the marriage yoke’.49 She revealed that until her marriage, no knowledge of evil had been allowed to ‘penetrate’ her life, and that she had been guarded ‘from all pain’.50 Aligning evil and penetration is the closest she comes to being able to describe her wedding night when she encountered, in the figure and needs of husband Frank, a rude awakening.

Annie’s niece Muriel Fisher wrote an autobiography and, looking back at her high-octane aunt, she was quite clear that narrow-minded Frank was the very last person she should have married.51 They lived in lodgings in Cheltenham in 1867 and the first few years of marriage passed in a blur of misery and illness. ‘I sailed out of the harbour of my safe and peaceful girlhood,’ Annie wrote, ‘onto the wide sea of life, and the waves broke roughly as soon as the bar was crossed.’52 Frank can hardly have fared much better. He believed in a husband’s authority, and like most Victorian men, was clear about his place as head of the household, and confidently expected his wife’s dutiful submission.

Middle-class women stayed home, financially supported by their husbands. Their role was to supervise the servants, but Annie shrank from doing so. In anticipation of babies, she could also have embroidered and kept scrapbooks, played the piano and sung, or read novels. She could have modelled herself on the devotion Queen Victoria showed to Albert, or she could have taken encouragement from Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House poem, which defined the ideal of the Victorian woman. Published in 1854, it evoked the idea of the wife living entirely in the domestic sphere existing only to delight her man. ‘Man must be pleased: but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure.’53 Even Queen Victoria, monarch and matriarch of the nation, agreed. ‘Let women be what God intended, a helpmate for man, but with totally different duties and vocations,’54 she insisted. She was no fan of women’s rights.

Frank expected a wife to be meek and submissive and yet here he was, teamed up with a woman who was accustomed to freedom, and who described herself as ‘impulsive, very hot-tempered and proud as Lucifer’.55 Minutes into the marriage, as a young woman with a mind of her own, she was indignant and disillusioned. Until now she had been able to follow her intellectual instincts and, although consumed by violent religious drama, she had lived a life without any actual anger or brutality. She had never been told what to do. ‘I had never had a harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me.’56 She was utterly indifferent to domestic chores, and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in 1861 with its 900 pages of recipes and household tips, was not on her reading list. ‘She was a very poor sort of a wife for an impecunious man,’ concluded her niece, ‘and no doubt her husband found her exceedingly incompetent.’57

A year into matrimony, Annie was still unable to evince any interest in running the house. She was distant from her disagreeable husband. Unwilling to do nothing, she took up her pen, which must have felt threatening and perverse to Frank. Why would a woman write? The Brontë sisters, Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) and Elizabeth Gaskell, at least early in her career, all wrote under male pseudonyms. As a conventional middle-class man of his times, it seems unlikely that Frank expected intellectual curiosity from his wife, or penmanship. For Annie, it was the start of a learning curve that was to shape her views of women’s rights.

Naturally she first wrote about the questions that had tormented her teens. In 1868, her erudite and niche article on ‘The Lives of the Black Letter Saints’, exploring the subject of the little-known saints who were not marked in red in the liturgical calendar, was her first unpublished work and one which disappeared without trace. She had better luck with fiction. The Family Herald: A Domestic Magazine of Useful Information and Amusement, price 1d, accepted a story from her. In payment, she was sent a cheque for 30s. She was thrilled, envisaging a future in which, by independent means, she was rewarded with ‘heaps of golden guineas’.58 It was the first money she had ever made and ‘the pride of earning was added to the pride of authorship’.59 She had an exhilarating sense of independence. The satisfaction did not last long. A woman, and anything she owned, remained the property of the husband until the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1870 allowed women married after this to retain money in their own name. Frank immediately claimed Annie’s small earnings. ‘It was rather a shock to learn that it was not really mine at all.’60 Her feminism was born.

Annie wrote a few more stories, but the magazine publisher said she was too political and she needed to concentrate on the domestic, a thought undoubtedly shared by Frank.61 That same year, a publisher was going to take an article she had written four years previously, ‘Notes of Fasting by a Layman’ and a supplementary paper called ‘Fasting Communion’. When Frank’s son found a copy in his papers after he had died, he discovered that his father had written on the outside, ‘I would not publish this thinking that she ought to be satisfied with the publishing of the preceding pamphlet.’62 Enough was enough, in Frank’s opinion.

Albeit unwillingly, Annie performed her wifely duties, and a son and a daughter were born in 1869 and 1870, both of whom gave her great comfort, although she was ill for months during each pregnancy. She and Frank quarrelled constantly and these arguments often turned violent. According to her own accounts presented in a court case many decades later, she was the victim of domestic abuse. She described how Frank shook her violently by the shoulders and repeatedly struck her hard with his knee, forcing her to flee the house. Frank kept a gun under his bed, she revealed, and often threatened to shoot her.63

Their daughter Mabel caught whooping cough in 1871, which nearly proved fatal. A drop of chloroform soothed the sick child’s near-death convulsions and she recovered. The horror of seeing Mabel suffer convinced her mother of the arbitrary nature of the universe and the cruelty of God and she sank into deep depression. In her later, post-Theosophy biography, she disclosed that she had reached the point in 1871 of wanting to commit suicide. Standing by the drawing room window, staring hopelessly at the evening sky, she suddenly recalled the chloroform used to ease Mabel’s pain. She raced to get the bottle, uncorked it, and raised it to her lips. At that moment, she tells us she heard a voice she attributed to a spirit guide, mocking her. ‘O coward, coward, who used to dream of martyrdom and cannot bear a few short years of pain!’64 She felt a rush of shame and flung the bottle into the garden.

Exhausted and unhappy, Annie found herself questioning all the religious certainties with which she had grown up. She did not want to believe in a world of undeserved suffering. She did not dare tell anyone and the weekly church services were torture. She wished to explore and understand that age-old question of how God could allow sin and suffering. She was horrified by having to live with her husband, but she was in even greater anguish about her religious soul. She found consolation talking to a sympathetic vicar (not her husband!), but it was not enough to quell her scepticism. ‘She would spend the rest of her life,’ writes historian Mark Bevir, ‘looking for answers to the questions raised by her doubts.’65

In 1872, the family moved from Cheltenham to a vicarage in rural Sibsey in Lincolnshire, with an income of £410 per annum.66 It was a transfer for which Annie was responsible, having taken it upon herself to request a living for her rather useless husband from her distant uncle, Lord Hatherley. It came with a delightful house with a beautiful garden, paddock and fields. Frank resented her intervention on his behalf, but stayed there for the rest of his days. The marriage did not improve. Annie was often ill, her mother was poorly, Mabel, too, was sickly and Frank was miserable with his intellectual and utterly undomesticated wife.

Unable to live with her religious doubts without a resolution, Annie did an extraordinary thing. Out of the blue, she started a correspondence with the leader of the Oxford Movement, the group which reasserted the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism. As a teenager she had read the writings of the influential conservative preacher Dr Pusey, and thought much about them, and she decided he might be able to help elucidate her troubles. This culminated in a visit to Oxford to ask his advice, an unlikely request from the wife of a clergyman from rural Lincolnshire. Pusey, short, stout and dressed in a cassock, was grumpy and uncomfortable, faced with his razor-sharp female inquisitor, and his responses were very like those which might have been offered by Annie’s husband. ‘It is not your duty,’ he told her, ‘to ascertain the truth. It is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the church.’67 Being ordered to accept without question was not Annie’s way. He accused her of being full of intellectual pride and, clearly ruffled by the presence of this argumentative, intellectually adept, stubborn young woman, shuddered, ‘Pray, pray, Father forgive her, for she knows not what she says.’68 And as she headed to the door, dissatisfied with the interview, Pusey’s parting shot was a command. ‘I forbid you to speak of your disbelief!’69 That was an order with which Annie was unlikely to comply.

Meeting two unorthodox men of religion on visits to her family in London in 1872 enabled Annie to explore her intellectual concerns further. She attended a lecture by Dr Voysey, who had been found guilty in an ecclesiastical court for preaching unorthodox ideas, and was forced to leave his parish. Shortly after, she met Thomas Scott, an elderly priest accused of heresy. Annie developed a close relationship with the families of both men, and her religious questioning only increased with contact. Both preachers were well known in radical circles and published prolifically, and they encouraged Annie to think again about writing.

The first article Annie wrote for Scott and Voysey was about Jesus. ‘On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth’ was published in 1873 and questioned the divinity of Christ. It told its readers, provocatively and anonymously, that it had been written by ‘the wife of a beneficed clergyman’.70 She did not inform her husband about her secret endeavour, but she had not taken enough precautions and she recalled in her memoir that word reached one of Frank’s relatives, possibly Walter Besant, stirring up a storm.

What would Society say? What would ‘the county families’ think if one of the clerical party was known to be a heretic. This dreadful little paper bore the inscription ‘By the wife of a beneficed clergyman’; what would happen if she were identified with Mrs. Besant of Sibsey?71

Frank commanded his wife to break off her correspondence with the nefarious Voysey, an instruction to which she initially agreed but did not stick with for long. Her intolerance of church dogma also escalated, and she refused to accept notions of eternal punishment or unpardonable sin. The reality was a miserable life with Frank and constant illness. Annie agonised about having to pretend in public that her faith had not crumbled. ‘Now that I had no doubt that Christianity was a delusion,’ she wrote, ‘I would no longer act as though I believed that to be of God which heart and intellect rejected as untrue.’72 Taking her courage in her hands, she planned at the next service to withdraw before communion. When she rose quietly from her pew, she felt sick to the stomach, and took her leave under the curious gaze of the whole parish.

In 1873, with all the shame she was heaping on him in front of his parishioners, Frank’s anger peaked. Annie had sought temporary respite for herself and the children with other family in London (probably her kindly Aunt Co, the only relative that stuck by her throughout), and one nightmarish day in September Frank turned up unannounced and furious. He scared them all with his aggression. He had had enough of his wife’s heresy and loudly demanded that she conform to the outward appearances of the church. He felt exposed and ridiculed socially and professionally. It was the end of the line. Annie’s mother was terrified for her daughter’s future, as well as for their present safety, and begged him on her knees to think again. This was Frank’s ultimatum. His wife had to agree, or else.73

Annie was not alone in questioning her religion. Between 1851 and 1875, while the Church of England was building or refurbishing 2,438 churches for the faithful, others were choosing different denominations. The 1851 census had found that only 5.2 per cent of the 18 million population attended Church of England services and nearly the same again attended Quaker, Methodist and Baptist services.74 At the same moment that Annie was refusing to accept Jesus as the Son of God, and traditional certainties were crumbling, the seeds were also being sown of a new faith further afield. Unknown to Annie, a mystic across the Atlantic was envisaging her own new philosophy of life eternal. This was the charismatic Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, whom Annie was not destined to meet for another sixteen years. Nevertheless, she would emerge as a profound influence on Annie’s life and on a generation of thinkers.

A large, baby-faced woman, with arresting eyes and an unconventionally forthright manner, Madame Blavatsky’s opaque biography teemed with seemingly impossible events. Born in 1831 of Russian and German nobility, she claimed she had ‘ridden horseback in a circus, toured Serbia as a concert pianist, opened an ink factory in Odessa, traded as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris, and worked as interior designer to Princess Eugenie’.75 She had been married, and perhaps she had had a child, but all the evidence was contradictory and unclear. She was known for her skills in levitation, telepathy and clairvoyance. In the early 1870s, this mystery woman was practising as a medium in Egypt, but in earlier years she had travelled the world (several times). She claimed to have undergone intensive training for six years in the Tibetan mountains (to which westerners were not admitted) with mystic men who had shared their occult knowledge with her. It was from this formative experience, with sages called Master Morya and Master Koot Hoomi, that the singular Madame had seemingly acquired encyclopaedic knowledge about religion, science and philosophy. From this maelstrom of exotic travel and learning, she embarked on the creation of her new faith system: Theosophy.

In Lincolnshire in 1873, Annie was still weighing up her options. She could stay with her husband and be a respected member of conventional society as a vicar’s wife, or she could follow her conscience and lose all status. The spirit world evoked by Madame Blavatsky was not yet a choice. Any spiritualist churches in the UK were far from being on Annie’s radar. Besides, she would have seen the spirit world as fanciful. Unlike Madame Blavatsky, Annie’s travels had been limited to Europe and her cultural references were Notre Dame and German castles, Aix-la-Capelle and Bonn, not Georgia, Cairo, India or Tibet. The two women were literally worlds apart.

Madame Blavatsky arrived in the States in 1873 when spiritualism was all the rage. There were mediums in every town. So great was public enthusiasm that in 1854, 15,000 people had signed a petition, introduced by a senator to Congress, urging an investigation of the new spiritualist sensation,76 and interest only increased with the casualties of the Civil War when survivors wanted to contact their deceased loved ones. As historian Molly McGarry points out, it is impossible to know exactly how many spiritualists (‘curious or convinced’) there were, but one sceptic and spiritualist debunker writing in the 1870s thought there might be 4 million in America, when the entire population mid-century was only 28 million.77 There was an epidemic of spiritualism.

In 1874, the illiterate Eddy brothers in Chittenden, Vermont, scheduled séances in their rundown farmhouse, which were so impressive that visitors poured in to see them from across the world. Some called the location the ‘Spirit Capital of the Universe.’ Madame Blavatsky was one of those who went to Chittenden to see for herself, although she had misgivings about her visit because of the presence of a journalist.

That journalist was Colonel Henry Olcott, formerly a respected army veteran, who had a strong curiosity about spiritualism and decided to investigate the Eddy phenomenon. After Blavatsky, he was to become the second key player in Annie’s Theosophical journey. He had earned his military rank as a lawyer when he was commissioned by the US government to scrutinise cases of fraud in military arsenals and shipyards after the civil war. Then in 1865 he was part of a team investigating whether conspiracy was involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was also well connected in cultured circles. With his solid reputation and his small wire glasses and Father Christmas beard, he was considered by his newspaper readers to be a trusted witness. He stayed at Chittenden for around three months, witnessing speaking in strange tongues, writing of messages in mid-air, spirit voices, clairvoyance and unfathomable materialised phantom forms.

Olcott was very struck by his first meeting with the eccentric Madame Blavatsky, who had a quirky liking for acronyms, and was often known as HPB. She wore a tartan Garibaldi shirt, a red wool jacket popularised in the 1860s and named after the Italian republican nationalist whom she claimed to have fought alongside. ‘Her hair,’ Olcott recalled, was ‘a thick blond mop, worn shorter than the shoulders, and it stood out from her head, silken-soft and crinkled to the roots, like the fleece of a Cotswold ewe.’78 She was gracious, captivating, witty and prone to extreme profanity. Once he had committed to not writing about her in his newspaper reports, they became firm friends, or as they called one another, ‘chums’. Their meeting in Chittenden, and the relationship that grew from it, laid the foundations for the creation of the new religion (or science as they preferred to call it). Meanwhile, the frustrated vicar’s wife in Sibsey was rebelling against the repressive ideas of her husband and staid Victorian society. She could no longer pretend to have a belief in Christianity.