ABSTRACT
Annie Besant’s father clearly was something more than a plain Wood. His persistent devotion to doctoring, his wide interests and knowledge, his religious scepticism, all these things seem to indicate some rarer element in his blood. Annie records that her mother’s hair turned from black to white in a single night after the death of her husband. It is probable that these day-dreams, common enough in children bred in religious homes, though not, perhaps, to the same pitch of intensity, would in time have ceased or been assimilated to exterior experience. But just at this point Miss Marryat came into the little girl’s life. Annie Besant was later quite conscious, as these passages show, of the course and the causes of her religious development, though very characteristically this awareness never stopped her from regarding this development as produced by spiritual necessity.
