Anna Kingsford was, it is well known, one of the earliest and foremost champions of the movement for women’s rights, but the line she took in this movement was supremely sane and wise, and was devoid of all the extravagances which have since brought certain sides of one of the greatest and most important movements of the day into well-deserved contempt. Edward Maitland was in entire sympathy with her in this matter, and in endorsing one of her communications to him observes: “I send you to-day’s _Times_, with a report of the debate on the Women’s Suffrage Bill, which will show you how much you are needed in that movement. For the debate shows why it does not advance. They are all on the wrong tack, supporters and opponents alike. The franchise is claimed in hostility, not sought in love. The women are demanding it as a means of defence and offence against man, instead of as a means of aiding and perfecting man’s work. They want a level platform with man expressly in order to fight him on equal terms. And of course the instinct of the majority of men and women resents such a view.” “Justice, in fact, as between men and women, human and animal,” was among Anna Kingsford’s foremost aims; for, as her biographer well says: “All injustice was cruelty, and cruelty was for her the one unpardonable sin.” “Her love,” he adds in a curiously revealing passage, “was all for principles, not for persons. The last thing contemplated by Anna Kingsford was an aggravation of the existing divisions and antagonisms between the sexes.” “And,” continues Mr Maitland, “so far from accepting the doctrine of the superiority of spinsterhood over wifehood, she regarded it as an assertion of the superiority of non-experience over experience as a means of education.” But that which most of all she reprobated was the disposition which led women to despise womanhood itself as an inferior condition, and accordingly to cultivate the masculine at the expense of the feminine side of their nature. “It was by magnifying their womanhood and not by exchanging it for a factitious masculinity that she would have her sex obtain its proper recognition.” This recognition no one more ardently desired than herself. She compares the modern woman to Andromeda bound to the rock on the seashore, shackled by the chains of ignorance and a helpless prey to that terrible monster whose name is ennui. “When,” she asks, “will Perseus come to deliver the fair Andromeda, to loosen her fetters and to set her free?” Much has happened to better the position of women since this was written, but much yet remains to be done. All who knew Anna Kingsford unite in testifying to the impression conveyed to them by her striking personality with its originality, freshness, and force, no less than by her many-sidedness and the strange contradictions of her character. Her biographer gives the following description of her appearance at the date when he first met her: