ABSTRACT
Of Mrs Annie Besant’s grandparents three were Irish. Her mother came of a relatively pure Irish family, the Maurices, though their name was spelt Morris. The Annie Wood family, again, that of her father, though it produced several well-known men, shows no out-of-the-way qualities. The revolution, in the case of the Wood family, was personified in Matthew Wood, who was born in 1768. Robert Wright Wood was Sir Matthew’s younger brother, and a son of his, William Burton Persse Wood was Annie’s father. In him we seem to note the first departure from the Wood tradition of solid normalcy. Mr Wood’s mother and sister were Roman Catholics and brought a priest to his bedside during his fatal illness, but the dying man drove him away, with the unyielding determination, just as heroic as the self-sacrifice of the religious martyr, so often shown by the convinced sceptic.
