Annie Besant (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Anne Taylor
- First Published: 1992
- Type of Work: Biography
- Time of Work: 1847-1933
- Setting: England and India
- Principal Characters: Annie Besant, Ellen Marryat, Frank Besant, Charles Bradlaugh, Madame Helene Petrovna Blavatsky
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Socialism, England or English people, Women’s issues, India or East Indian people, Secularism, Atheism, Victorian era or Victorianism, Celibacy, Activism, Theosophy
- Locales: England, India
The course Annie Besant’s extraordinary life would take, Anne Taylor suggests, was determined on the day her father died, in London, in 1852. Her mother moved the family to genteel Harrow, where boys from the famous school lodged in the house. Here, a desire for the male world of learning they could enter rubbed off on Annie. At the age of eight, her education was entrusted to a stranger, Ellen Marryat, a brilliant woman of independent means attracted by Annie’s potential.
Taylor rightly stresses the importance of Marryat in shaping Annie’s life. She developed in Annie...
[The entire page is 2310 words long]
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