Rereading Annie Besant’s An Autobiography: Tracing The Running Threads

Though known to the world as a champion of radical ideas, Annie Besant has today fallen out of favour of critics worldwide. Critics have claimed to find a chasm between her private and public selves which they have interpreted as an inconsistency, almost amounting to a case of double lives. However, much of the readings that have focused on the “inconsistency” of views of Annie Besant have failed to take into account the context in which the shifts in her career took place. Besant’s public image did not mask the divided self as some say, but rather it was the purposeful channeling of energies considered to be appropriately confined to the private world of women onto a much wider public canvas. Annie Besant’s conversion to the theosophical faith needs to be seen in the context of many women of the Theosophical Society became suffragists to promote the spiritualizing of politics, attempting to create a political role for women as a way to enter the public sphere.