The Nine Lives of Annie Besant

On Thursday, 5 April 1877, police charged 30-year-old Annie Besant and her colleague Charles Bradlaugh with breaching the Obscene Publications Act 1857. The reason was the scandalous sale of a slim book called The Fruits of Philosophy – a book that advocated for birth control in an era when parents were encouraged to keep their daughters ignorant and fearful. The publication of this guide, which the prosecutor in the trial referred to as a ‘dirty, filthy book’, made Annie famous.

But this was not Annie’s first or last battle against Victorian social mores.

She was a good Christian wife who became an atheist; a liberal campaigner who became a prominent socialist activist in the strikes and protests of the 1880s; a Theosophical High Priestess who became heavily involved in the Indian nationalist movement. Viewed as a dangerous threat to imperial government and authority, she was a fearless and formidable freedom fighter.

Annie Besant lived an extraordinary and inspiring life, and yet because of her complexities and seeming contradictions, she has been sidelined by history.

From politics to the occult, from Christianity to Theosophy and from the London suburbs to a pyre on the banks of an Indian river, The Nine Lives of Annie Besant tells the complete story of a woman who broke all the rules.