'Annie Besant had a remarkably varied career. The rapid succession of her enthusiasms prompted her biographer Arthur H. Nethercot to describe her as having nine lives, with four of her lives devoted to India. A revision of his categories to emphasize her busy middle years might identify a different nine lives: as the devoutly Christian clergyman's wife, the outspoken atheist who espoused a secular religion of humanity, the birth control crusader who seized public attention during a dramatic court trial, the student and teacher of the natural sciences, the socialist agitator, the patron of a strike by unskilled women workers, the educational reformer at the London School Board, the theosophist believer in the occult, and (overlapping with the long theosophist phase), the friend of Indian nationalism. She also supported controversial feminist reforms such as equal rights for women in marriage and divorce and voting in parliamentary elections, advocated a republican form of government in Britain, and condemned racism and imperialism.'
(Source: Historic World Leaders, Gale Research, 1994)
