Magnifying Martyrdom: Annie Bonus's Beatrice and the Victorian Vision of the Early Church

Abstract

Anna Kingsford, born Annie Bonus in September 1846, died at a young enough age to qualify for one of the most lovingly detailed of all nineteenth-century biographies. It appeared in January 1896, within eight years of her death. Its author, Edward Maitland, was in fact a prolific writer in several fields; but he never came closer than here to having an ideal subject to set before his Victorian readers. For not only had the culture of the nineteenth century already tended (with instruments as diverse as the national census and the personal diary) to reaffirm absolutely Samuel Johnson's famous axiom that ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful' but Anna Kingsford had had one of those lives, peculiarly interesting to the Victorians, which the process of narration inevitably turns into histories of this or that set of religious opinions. She herself, in her final months of life, perceived as much; and it accordingly became ‘necessary’—or so she ventured to suggest—‘that I should not die without some sort of Apologia’.