Annie Besant

English social reformer

• Born: October 1, 1847
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 20, 1933
• Place of death: Adyar, India

After her early work promoting radical reform in England, Besant became leader of the Theosophical Society and was active in the nationalist movement in India.

Early Life

Annie Wood Besant was born on October 1, 1847, in London, England, the second of three children of William and Emily Morris Wood. Despite her English birth, Besant had a strong sense of Irish heritage, because her mother was Irish and her father half Irish. William Wood, although trained as a physician, engaged in commerce in London. He died when Besant was five, a loss the trauma of which was compounded by the death several months later of her baby brother.

When Besant was eight, her impoverished widowed mother moved the family to Harrow so that her ten-year-old son Henry could more cheaply attend that prestigious public school. Shortly after the move, Miss Ellen Marryat, youngest sister of the novelist Frederick Marryat, offered to take Annie into her home in Devon to educate her. Although heartsick to be separated from her adored mother for the eight years she spent with Miss Marryat, Besant received excellent training, especially in literary skills, which enabled her to produce throughout her life a prodigious volume of writings for her many causes.

During her adolescent years, Besant was intensely religious. Reading stories of early Christian martyrs, she longed to follow in their steps. She fasted regularly, tortured herself with self-flagellation, and engaged in other extremist behavior, a pattern that became characteristic of her personality. A person of deep if changing beliefs, she would always commit herself enthusiastically and wholeheartedly to her convictions, with the ever-present, self-proclaimed wish for martyrdom.

At the age of sixteen, Besant returned to her mother’s home. She was a beautiful young woman, of small stature, with brown hair and eyes. She had, however, no romantic fantasies, for her emotional life was absorbed by her passionate love for Jesus Christ and for her mother. She nevertheless married, in 1867, the Reverend Frank Besant, younger brother of the essayist Walter Besant, because she believed that she could best serve God as a clergyman’s wife.

The marriage was a disaster. Annie, who married with no knowledge of sex, was shocked by her wedding night. Self-willed and rebellious, she also resented submitting to her domineering husband’s authority. Her unhappiness was only somewhat alleviated by her success in selling several stories to the Family Herald and by the births of her son Digby, in 1869, and daughter Mabel, in 1870. She also found satisfaction in parish work when Frank Besant became vicar at Sibsey, a village in Lincolnshire. The marriage ended when Annie lost her religious faith after the grave illness of her children, whose sufferings made her doubt her belief in a loving and merciful God. The Besants were legally separated in 1873. She moved to London to make her way on her own with her daughter, while her son remained in the custody of the Reverend Besant.

Life’s Work

Annie Besant’s public career went through many distinct stages. After her loss of Christian faith and separation from her husband, she came under the influence of England’s leading freethinker, Charles Bradlaugh. In 1874, she joined the National Secular Society and soon became one of its vice presidents. She edited with Bradlaugh the freethinking National Reformer , and, from 1883 to 1889, she also edited the magazine Our Corner . In these journals, she wrote in support of atheism, women’s rights, Irish home rule, and land-tenure reform, and against British imperialism. Besant propagated her beliefs not only in written form but also as a public speaker, an activity not considered respectable for women at that time. Her rich, vibrant voice made her a great success, and she took intense pleasure in the power she had over her audiences. Ever eager to absorb new knowledge, the energetic Besant also found time to enroll in courses in science at London University.

Besant’s most controversial work with Bradlaugh was their republication in 1877 of Charles Knowlton’s 1832 treatise on birth control, Fruits of Philosophy . They were arrested, and, in a sensational trial, they were convicted of publishing obscene literature, although their conviction was dismissed on appeal on a technicality. The defiant Besant then published her own birth control pamphlet, Law of Population: Its Consequence and Its Bearing upon Human Conduct and Morals (1881). She was the first Englishwoman to advocate publicly the use of birth control methods. Even though she was not prosecuted for her pamphlet, the controversy did cause her to lose custody of her daughter.

Besant’s humanitarian concerns led her in 1885 to become a socialist. Joining the moderate Fabian Society , she contributed an article to the influential 1889 Fabian Essays in Socialism , edited by her close friend George Bernard Shaw . She later also joined the revolutionary Marxist Social Democratic Federation . Ever concerned with theatrical display, she began to dress in proletarian garb and always wore a piece of red clothing to show her socialist affiliation. This latest cause separated her from Bradlaugh, who was a strong antisocialist individualist. They remained personal friends, but she resigned as coeditor of the National Reformer.

As a socialist, Besant fought tirelessly to help working people, especially in trade union activity. Her most significant achievement was her organization of match-girl workers into a union, after helping them in a successful strike against the Bryant and May Match Company in 1888. The Matchmaker’s Union, considered the beginning of the new unionism of unskilled labor, was moreover the first successful effort to organize women workers, who had been ignored by the Trades Union Council. Besant also worked for socialist causes as a member of the London school board, to which she was elected in 1889.

Despite her advocacy of atheism, Besant felt increasingly unsatisfied by it and later spoke of her desperate hunger for spiritual ideals. This need was fulfilled by Theosophy, to which she, to the shock of her friends and associates, converted in 1889 after reading Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888). A charismatic Russian émigrée, Mme Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 along with the American lawyer Colonel Henry Olcott. The society, which remains active, aims at fostering bonds among all humanity; studying comparative religions and philosophies, especially those from ancient Eastern civilizations; and investigating and communicating with the world of the occult. Although not identified with any specific religion, Theosophists accept the Hindu and Buddhist belief in karma and reincarnation.

Committing herself fully to her new faith, Besant withdrew from the National Secular Society and the socialist organizations. She became editor of the Theosophist publication Lucifer and the leader of the Theosophical Society in England after Mme Blavatsky’s death in 1891. In 1907, she was elected President of the Theosophical Society worldwide, a position she held for the rest of her life. As a Theosophist, in 1891 she renounced Malthusianism and withdrew her Law of Population from circulation. Although anguished at the effect this might have on the lives of poor women, she accepted Mme Blavatsky’s view that humans must rise above animal passion through self-control and ascetic self-denial. Besant later returned to a qualified endorsement of birth control.

Besant traveled extensively throughout the world, organizing and lecturing for the Theosophical Society. After her first trip to India in 1893, she thought of that country as her home and believed that in earlier incarnations she had been Indian. She adopted Indian dress and in public always wore a white sari, which matched her now-white hair. Strongly drawn toward Hinduism, she learned Sanskrit and in 1895 translated the Bhagavadgītā (first or second century c.e.).

Always the reformer, Besant was concerned to revitalize Indian civilization, to restore pride and self-respect in a people who had been made to feel inferior by British imperialists. She condemned child marriage, the seclusion of women, and eventually the caste system, but otherwise opposed efforts to westernize India. Disavowing at first political activity, Besant worked primarily for educational reform. Her major accomplishment was the establishment of the Central Hindu College in Benares in 1898, a college for Hindu boys based on ancient Indian religion and culture as well as modern Western science. In 1904, she established the Central Hindu Girls’ School, an important step in the emancipation of Indian women. The Hindu University, which absorbed the Central Hindu College in 1916, granted Besant an honorary degree in 1921, and thereafter she always styled herself Dr. Besant.

Besant eventually came to believe that efforts to strengthen Indian cultural pride were impossible as long as India was under British domination. In 1913, therefore, she entered the political arena by working actively for Indian home rule. As a vehicle for her campaign, she bought a Madras newspaper and renamed it New India. Founding the Home Rule for India League in 1916, she campaigned for self-government within the British Empire, which she envisioned as a partnership among equal nations. Her agitation against the British caused the government to intern her briefly during World War I, which only increased her popularity among Indians. In 1917, after her release, she was elected President of the Indian National Congress. She did not, however, remain long as leader of the Indian nationalists. She was soon eclipsed by the rise of the Mahatma Gandhi, with whose tactic of civil disobedience she disagreed, for fear that it would lead to violence. Considered too conservative in her insistence on law and order, she lost much of her political following in India.

Besant continued working for Indian home rule, and in 1925 she had an abortive Commonwealth of India Bill introduced into the English House of Commons. Her primary focus in the last part of her life, however, was in the promotion of her Hindu protégé, Jiddu Krishnamurti, as the new Messiah. Believing that in times of world crisis the Divine Spirit enters a human body to help humankind toward higher spiritual consciousness, she was convinced that Krishnamurti was the chosen vehicle. He ultimately disappointed her by renouncing his role in the divine plan. Besant nevertheless continued working for her beliefs almost until her death on September 20, 1933, in Adyar, India, the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society. A portion of her ashes was sprinkled in the holy Ganges River, the rest deposited in a Garden of Remembrance at Adyar.

Significance

An enthusiast for many causes, the leader of diverse movements, Annie Besant remained throughout her life committed to the principles of compassion, freedom, tolerance, and human equality. As a young woman, she had the courage to challenge such icons of Victorian respectability as the Church, patriarchy, propriety, capitalism, and imperialism. Although ultimately unsuccessful in her later years as a leader of the Indian home rule movement, she nevertheless made a significant contribution to Indian nationalism in helping to restore the pride of Indians in their own cultural heritage and in sensitizing the British to the narrowness and bigotry of their attitude of superiority toward India.

In her work as a Theosophist, to which she gave her most loyal and lasting allegiance, she incorporated the humanitarian concerns that had informed her other campaigns. Through her leadership she enabled the society to survive scandals, power struggles, and schisms. Although professing beliefs that the conventional world considered bizarre, she remained a personage of influence and respect and left as her legacy the vision of one world, seen and unseen, undivided by race, class, or sex, and bound together by love.

Bibliography

Besant, Annie. An Autobiography. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893. A passionate, frank account of her life up to 1891. A revision of her 1885 Autobiographical Sketches.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Selection of the Social and Political Pamphlets of Annie Besant. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970. A collection of twenty-seven of Besant’s pamphlets on English radical reform, published from 1874 to 1889, with a preface and bibliographical notes by John Saville.

Besant, Annie, and Charles Knowlton.“A Dirty, Filthy Book”: The Writings of Charles Knowlton and Annie Besant on Reproductive Physiology and Birth Control and an Account of the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial. Edited by Sripati Chandrasekhar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Includes Besant’s Law of Population and her recantation Theosophy and the Law of Population (1891), as well as Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy. The texts are prefaced by a useful introduction.

Nethercot, Arthur H. The First Five Lives of Annie Besant. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960. A balanced, detailed life of Besant up to 1893. Although it sometimes relies uncritically on Besant’s autobiographical writings, this book and the second volume (below), is the most complete and reliable biography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963. Besant’s life and work in India from 1893 to her death. Based on extensive research in archives of the Theosophical Society and on interviews with Besant’s family members and associates. An indispensable source.

Taylor, Anne. Annie Besant: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Recent biography based in part on Besant’s previously unpublished letters. Includes information on Besant’s love affairs and her bid for religious and political power in India.

Washington, Peter. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru. London: Secker & Warburg, 1993. Skeptical, yet fair and accurate history of Theosophy from the eighteenth century to the current new age movement. Includes information about Besant’s life and career.

West, Geoffrey. The Life of Annie Besant. London: Gerald Howe, 1929. A lively, opinionated biography, written by a contemporary who admired Besant’s achievements but was skeptical of Theosophy.

Williams, Gertrude Marvin. The Passionate Pilgrim: A Life of Annie Besant. New York: Coward-McCann, 1931. A readable popular biography. No footnotes, but a good bibliography.