Anna Kingsford
THE STORY OF ANNA KINGSFORD AND
EDWARD MAITLAND
AND
OF THE NEW GOSPEL OF
INTERPRETATION.
CHAPTER I.
THE VOCATION.
My colleague in the work, the history of which I am about to render some account, was the late Anna Kingsford, née Bonus, M.D. of the University of Paris.
There was a link between her husband's family and mine, but we were not personally acquainted until, in the summer of 1873, she was led by reading one of my books[8] to open a correspondence with me, which disclosed so striking a community between us of ideas, aims, and methods, that I accepted an invitation to visit her at her husband's rectory at Pontesbury, Salop, in Shropshire, for the sake of a fuller discussion of them. This visit which lasted nearly a fortnight, took place in February, 1874[9].
The account I received of her history was in this wise. Born at Stratford, in Essex, on the 16th September, 1846, long after the last of her many brothers and sisters, and endowed with the most fragile of constitutions and liabilities the most distressing of bodily weakness and suffering, and differing widely, moreover, in temperament from all with whom she was associated, her young life had enjoyed but a scanty share of human sympathy, and was largely one of solitude and meditation, and such as to foster the highly artistic, idealistic, and mystic tendencies with which she was born. Singularly energetic of will, and conscious of powers both transcending in degree and differing in kind from any that she recognised in others, she assiduously exercised her faculties in many and various directions in the hope of discovering the special direction in which her mission lay. For, from her earliest childhood she had been conscious of a mission, for the accomplishment of which she had expressly come into the earth-life. And she claimed even to have distinct recollection of having been strongly dissuaded from coming, on account of the terrible suffering which awaited her in the event of her assuming a body of flesh. Indeed, so little conscious was she of the reality of her human parentage that she was wont to look upon herself as a suppositious child of fairy origin; and on her first visit to the pantomime, when the fairies made their appearance on the stage, she declared that they were her proper people, and cried and struggled to get to them with such vehemence that it was necessary to remove her from the theatre. Among her amusements, her chief delight was in the ample gardens around her homes at Stratford and Blackheath, where she would hold familiar converse with the flowers, putting into their petals tiny notes for her lost relatives, the fairies, who in return would visit her in her dreams and assure her of their continued affection, and counsel her to have patience and courage.
The chief occupation of her girlhood was the writing of poems and tales[10] which were tinged with an exquisite mysticism, and showed a ripeness of soul and maturity of feeling and knowledge wholly unaccountable for by her years, her experiences, or her physical heredity. At school she always obtained the first prizes for composition, and her faculty of improvisation was the delight of her companions; the subjects of these her earlier romances being lovely princesses, gallant knights, castles, dragons, and the like, when—as may readily be supposed—her tall and slender frame, long golden hair, delicacy of complexion, deep-set hazel eyes, beauty of feature, the brow and the mouth being especially notable, the brightness of her looks, vivacity of her manner, her musical voice, and the easy eloquence of her diction,—all combined to make her an ideal heroine for her own romances. She could hardly, however, be said to be a persona grata with her pastors and masters. For while her independence of character and strength of will were apt to bring her into conflict with rules and regulations of which she failed to recognise the need, her thirst for knowledge, especially on religious subjects, prompted her to the proposition of questions which were highly embarrassing to her teachers; and nothing that they could say succeeded in convincing her that her duty lay in believing what she was told, and not in understanding it. She very early learnt to resent the disabilities of her sex, and to insist that they were not real but artificial, the result of masculine selfishness and injustice. This hatred of injustice and its correlative cruelty, especially towards animals, attained in her the force and dignity of a passion, her sensitiveness on this score making the chief mental misery of her life.