ABSTRACT
This was the Annie Wood of the year following her eighteenth birthday. She was deeply and emotionally religious. How right was her mother when, shortly before her death, she said to her daughter, who had then already embarked on her freethought career, “My little one, you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have always been too religious”! With this intense religiosity she had considerable intellectual curiosity, a well-stocked mind, endless determination, and much self-confidence. When she repressed her first religious doubts, her feelings, as so often happens, only became the more fervent and unreasoning. As her sexual feelings awakened, distorted as they were by complete ignorance of sexual matters, they joined with the repressed emotional religious feelings, to produce phantasies of a pronouncedly erotic kind. She was “absorbed in that passionate love of ‘the Saviour’ which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human passion of love transferred to an ideal.” Here we have again that phenomenon which recurs again and again in Annie Besant’s life, a true intellectual understanding of a situation, wholly untinged by introspection or application to herself.
