Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Annie Besant was arguably the most famous, or rather infamous,
woman of her age. For much of the 1870s and 1880s she promoted
the secularist cause with remarkable vigour. She became a vice-
president of the National Secular Society, the members of which thought
almost as highly of her as they did of Charles Bradlaugh, the president.
In
1889, however, she joined the Theosophical Society in a sensational move
that shocked even her closest friends. Eventually she became president
of
the Theosophical Society, the members of which again revered her almost
as much as they did its prophet, Madame Blavatsky. Besant moved from
the materialist atheism of the secularists to the New Age thought of the
theosophists. All of her previous biographers have emphasised the contrast
between these two sets of beliefs. They have been unable to recover any
coherence in her activities within the secularist, Fabian and theosophical
movements. Indeed, they have spoken of her many lives, as though she
wandered aimlessly, if enthusiastically, from cause to cause with no
guiding theme whatsoever. When they do look for a pattern in her life,
they typically turn not to her reasons for doing what she did, but rather
to her hidden needs, such as to follow a dominant man or to exercise her
powers. They turn to her emotional make-up to explain her final flight
from reason, and they then explain her earlier commitments by reference
to the emotions they have uncovered. In contrast, I hope to represent
Besant's life as a reasoned quest for truth in the context of the
Victorian
crisis of faith and the social concerns it helped to raise. Besant, with
her
secularism, Fabianism and theosophy, was very much of her time, for
whilst the early part of Queen Victoria's reign was shaped by a religious
movement to make Britain a truly Christian nation and a political
movement to make Britain a democratic nation, the later part of her reign
took its shape from the need to find both a faith capable of surviving
the
rationalist onslaught and solutions to the social problems an extended
franchise had failed to solve.</jats:p>