Annie Besant : an autobiography ... / [Annie Wood Besant].

  • Annie Besant
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annie Besant : an autobiography ... / [Annie Wood Besant]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    night of agony, and to me my mother’s face is ever framed in exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow. I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life. He was keenly intel- lectual and splendidly educated ; a mathematician and a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily house- hold delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading aloud to her while she worked ; now translating from some foreign poet, now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of “ Queen Mab.” Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical ; and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her darling at the last. Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that “ women ought to be religious,” while men had a right to read everything and think as they would, provided that they