Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at her family’s homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts (nowadays the home of the Emily Dickinson Museum). She received her early education at a one-room primary school and later attended Amherst Academy. From an early age, she was troubled by the prospect of death, especially following the death of her second cousin and a close friend in 1844, resulting in her being sent to relatives in Boston to recuperate. After graduation, Dickinson went to study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley but returned home after only ten months. During her 20s, her mother suffered from various chronic illnesses, and Dickinson took on all domestic responsibilities and became more and more reclusive. 1855 was the last time Dickinson left her hometown when she traveled to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia; afterward, she rarely left town and confined herself to her homestead and her brother’s house next door. She started writing poetry when she was 11 but received validation only when she was 18 when a family friend read her poems and encouraged her to write. In the sanctuary of her home, withdrawn from the outside world, Dickinson’s writing flourished; between 1858 to 1865, she had her most productive period, in which she wrote about 800 poems, making clean copies of her work and assembling them in 40 booklets, today known as her fascicles. During this period, Dickinson was corresponding with Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, to whom she sent dozens of letters and nearly fifty poems, and he published a few of them in his newspaper. Dickinson also befriended the literary critic and radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson following an article he published in 1862 encouraging young writers to publish their work. In 1866, Dickinson’s solitude worsened, and she rarely left her homestead and even talked to her visitors through the door without seeing them. However, she was very expressive in her notes and letters to her family and friends. Although she continued to write poetry, her productivity declined, and she stopped assembling her work into the booklets. In 1874, her father died, and her mother suffered a stroke, and over the next few years, more friends and family members died, including her mother, nephew, and beloved dog. These occurrences affected Dickinson’s mental and physical health, and in November 1885, she had to be confined to her bed for several months until she died at 55. Though she wrote thousands of poems and letters, only ten were published during her life, most anonymously and some without her consent. A few years before she died, she made her sister Lavinia swear to burn her papers after her death. Lavinia kept her promise and burned most of Dickinson’s correspondence, but after she found a collection of about 1800 of her poems and recognized their worth, she set her mind to editing and publishing them. In 1890, four years after she died, Dickinson’s first collection was published and received critical and financial success. Her second collection was published the following year, running through five editions within two years. Since then, Dickinson’s work has remained continuously in print; but it wasn’t until 1955, with Thomas H. Johnson’s Dickinson’s Complete Poems, that her poems were published as they were initially written, without editing and altering. A fruitful writer throughout three decades, the themes of Dickinson’s poems changed over time. From conventional and sentimental in her early work, she became more versatile and wrote about various themes, including love, identity, life, death, and immortality, as in one of her most famous poems, “Because I did not stop for Death.” Her work is known for the unique use of metaphors and “flower language” to symbolize topics such as prudence, youth, and poetry, but its real distinction is its structure. In her writing style, Dickinson challenged conventions by ignoring the rules of grammar and syntax and using line braking, punctuation, and capitalization in unfamiliar ways. It created a sort of off-rhymes that formed into an enigmatic and haunting personal voice that made her one of the most important and influential poets of the 19th century and American literature at large. Read more...

Martha Argerich was born and raised in Buenos Aires. She had a strong passion for music from a young age, playing the piano by ear at the age of three; two years later, the Italian pianist Vincenzo Scaramuzza became her teacher. At 8, she had her debut concert, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major. In 1955, at 14, she moved with her family to Europe, traveling from London to Vienna to Switzerland and studying with renowned pianists such as Friedrich Gulda, Maria Curcio, Bruno Seidlhofer, and Madeleine Lipatti. At 16, she won the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition with only three weeks separating between the two competitions. Following her success, she traveled to NYC, hoping to study with her idol, Vladimir Horowitz, but the plan failed. Discouraged, Argerich gave up the piano and considered becoming a secretary or doctor. However, after three years, she returned to playing and soon made her first recording, playing pieces by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Prokofiev. In 1965, at 24, Argerich won the VII International Chopin Piano Competition and made her US debut in the Great Performers series at the Lincoln Center in NYC. Argerich is best known for her collaborative chamber music, with a repertoire that includes Bach, Bartok, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Ravel, and Tchaikovsky. Argerich established several music festivals and competitions, including the International Piano Competition and Festival Martha Argerich in Buenos Aires, the Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano, and the Beppu Festival in Japan, where she has served as the Artistic Director. Her exceptional technique, energy, and emotional depth earned her a name of a brilliant pianist. Her hundreds of recordings granted her various of the most prestigious awards in the music industry, including the Grammy, the Gramophone, and the BBC Music Magazine Award, recognizing her as one of the greatest pianists the world had ever had. Read more...

According to the Roman author Gaius Julius Hyginus in his mythology story collection, Fabulae, Agnodice (or Agnodike) was born into a wealthy Athenian family during the 4th Century BCE. Growing up, she was aware of the high mortality rate of infants and mothers during childbirth and decided to become a physician. During that time, women were not allowed to practice medicine, so Agnodice disguised herself as a man, cut off her hair, wore men’s clothes, and traveled to Alexandria to study medicine under Herophilus. On her return to Athens, Agnodice began to practice medicine, focusing on women in labor, especially those who were embarrassed or refused to be treated by a man. In one case, in which a patient did not trust Agnodice as a male physician, Agnodice revealed her true gender. Afterward, the word spread amongst the women of Athens, and her reputation and popularity grew. Envying her success, the (male) doctors accused Agnodice of seducing her patients. She was sent to trial by Areopagus, the Athenian governing council, and had to expose herself as a woman to prove her innocence. She was accused of violating the law prohibiting women from practicing medicine. As a result of her patients’ campaign for her defense, a new law allowed freeborn women in Athens to study and practice medicine, making Agnodice officially the first female physician. For over 2000 years, Agnodice has symbolized determination and female equality. Her story has been often cited, in particular, in the context of the role of women in the medical profession. Read more...

Bertha Sophie Felicitas Freifrau von Suttner was born in Prague, then in the kingdom of Bohemia, part of the Austrian Empire. Her father was from an aristocratic family, and her mother was of an untitled nobility, so Bertha was not considered part of the Austrian high nobility because of her “mixed” descent. Soon after she was born, her father died, and she and her mother moved to Brno to live with her maternal family. There, Bertha was introduced to literature and philosophy by her cousin Elvira. She also studied French, Italian, and English and became an accomplished pianist and singer. In 1856, after her mother gambled all their money, they moved to Vienna for a few years before relocating to Klosterneuburg, where Bertha published her first work, the novella Erdenträume im Monde. Due to their financial situation, Bertha tried to become an opera singer and took intensive vocal lessons. However, her stage fright impacted her performance, and she couldn’t secure a job. In 1873, at 30, Bertha began to work as the governess of the four girls of the von Suttner family. She and the girls had a close connection, and later she used the nickname they gave her, “Boulotte” (fatty), as her pseudonym B. Oulot. During that time, she developed a romantic relationship with the girl’s elder brother, Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. In 1876, encouraged by her employers, who opposed her relationship with their son, Bertha applied and accepted a position as Alfred Nobel’s secretary-housekeeper at his Paris residence. After only one week, she returned to Vienna to secretly marry von Suttner. They eloped to Georgia and settled in Kutaisi, where they lived in poverty and worked as music and language teachers to the children of the local aristocracy. To supplement their income, both worked as writers, he covered the Russo-Turkish War, and Bertha contributed to the Austrian press and began working on her first novel, Es Löwos, published in 1906. In 1882, the couple moved to Tbilisi, where Bertha focused on her writing. The following year, she published her first significant political work, Inventarium einer Seele (Inventory of the Soul), claiming that world peace is inevitable because of technological advancement. In 1885, at 42, the Suttners returned to Austria, living in Harmannsdorf Castle in Burgschleinitz-Kühnring. For the next few years, she continued to work mainly as a journalist, writing primarily about peace and war issues. In 1889, Bertha published the pacifist novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!). The book was translated into 12 languages and published in 37 editions, making her a leading figure in the peace movement. She used her rising status to promote pacifist ideas by any means possible. Among her many actions, she founded and chaired the German Peace Society, established the international pacifist journal Die Waffen nieder!, helped to fund the establishment of the Bern Peace Bureau, presented Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria a petition to establish an International Court of Justice, and participated in the First Hague Convention in 1899. To support herself financially, she continued to write novels in which she incorporated her pacifistic ideas. In 1904, 61 years Bertha embarked on a seven months tour across the US to promote universal peace and to attend the International Peace Congress in Boston. Her main argument was that the right to peace needs to be enshrined in international law, as it is an evolutionary necessity. In 1905, Bertha and her comrade Tobias Asser were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their contribution to developing an international order based on peace rather than war. She became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the second female Nobel laureate (after Marie Curie), and the first Austrian laureate. She continued to campaign for international peace and against armament, and in 1911, at 68, Bertha was appointed a member of the advisory council of the Carnegie Peace Foundation. During the last months of her life, she worked on organizing the next Peace Conference, intended to take place in September 1914. She died of cancer in June of that year at 71. The conference was canceled; ironically, a week after it was supposed to take place, the heir to the Austria-Hungary throne, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, an event that triggered WWI. Read more...

Luce Irigaray was born in Blaton, Belgium. Not much is known about her upbringing and personal life because she believes that revealing details in the male-dominated academic establishment was usually used to challenge and criticize the works of women. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Catholic University of Leuven and later worked as a high school teacher in Brussels. In 1960, at 30, she moved to Paris to further her education, receiving a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Paris VIII in 1968. Her dissertation, an attempt to establish the grammar of dementia patients, was the basis of her first book Le Langage des déments, published in 1973. During the 1960s, she studied to become a psychoanalyst at Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic seminars at the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). She then held a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research). Combining her knowledge in both psychology and linguistics, she researched gender differences in language and concluded that speech is never neutral but always marked by sexual differences. In 1974, Irigaray published her second doctoral thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman, criticizing the roots of Western psychoanalysis. In this pioneering text, she argued that because Freud always used a boy as his paradigm of psychosexual development, the masculine was the norm, and girls and women got reduced to being inferior to males and functioned as commodities. She also claimed that in a culture where the line of descent goes from father to son, whose symbolism takes no account of the mother-daughter line, women do not exist as women but only as mothers subordinate to a patriarchal order, preferably as the mothers of sons. Her work received much criticism from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and she got dismissed from her teaching positions at the University of Vincennes. In 1977, she published the book This Sex Which is Not One, arguing that in a phallic-centered economy, women were a commodity because all forms of transactions were done and managed only between men. She played on the two meanings of “One” in the book title. The female was not sex because women got demoted to being nothing more than inferior men and did not exist in their own right, and the sex of women was not one because it was not reducible to one organ as men. In 1982, at 52, Irigaray began to serve as head of the Philosophy department at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. There, she worked on research that resulted in her 1984 book, An Ethics of Sexual. The book, in which she stated that Western culture is unethical because of gender discrimination, established her as an influential continental philosopher. She is also considered to be one of “The French Feminism,” together with the philosopher Helen Helene Cixous and others. Over the following decades, in addition to giving seminars and lectures throughout Europe, Irigaray continued to explore the differences between men’s and women’s languages. Through this research, she discovered a correlation between the language of men and women and the suppression of female thought and that gendered language patterns indicate subjectivity in women and male dominance. Her later work delved into the possibility of creating a female imagination that would allow women to speak as women and not as “lesser to men” and incorporate utopian speculation about possible ethics of sexual differences, in which she implied a recognition of a distinct male and female psychosexual economics that can coexist without one being reduced to the other. Read more...

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born in her family estate Mårbacka in Värmland, Sweden. She was a quiet child who spent most of her time reading and listening to her grandmother’s fairy tales and fantasy stories. From an early age, Lagerlöf wrote poetry but didn’t publish it. She received her early education at home and, at 24, left for Stockholm to attend the Royal Women’s Superior Training Academy and became a teacher. In 1885, at 27, Lagerlöf began to work as a country schoolteacher. There, she developed her story-telling skills to teach her students about the different countries in the religious scriptures. At the time, she began to work on a novel. In 1890, She submitted her first chapters to a magazine literary competition and won first prize – a publishing contract for a book. The following year, she published her first novel Gösta Berling’s Saga. Although it later became one of Swedish literature’s greatest classics, in the beginning, it went unnoticed and received few reviews. That changed when its Danish translation received critical acclaim, and Lagerlöf gained acknowledgment for her work. With the financial support of the philanthropic feminist Fredrika Limnell, Lagerlöf could concentrate on her writing, and by 1895 she stopped teaching. Together with her friend and companion Sophie Elkan, Lagerlöf made two journeys that influenced her literary future. While in Italy, she heard a legend about a Christ Child figure that was replaced with a false version. This story inspired her 1897 novel Antikrists Mirakler (The Miracles of the Antichrist). In 1900, her visit to Jerusalem resulted in her most acclaimed work, a two-volume book titled Jerusalem, about several generations of pilgrims who moved to the holy land. Published in 1901, the book became a best seller in Sweden and abroad, and Lagerlöf was compared to Homer and Shakespeare. In 1902, at 44, Lagerlöf accepted the National Teachers’ Association’s request to write a geography book for children. Published in 1906, Nils Holgerssons Underbara Resa Genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils) follows a boy from the southernmost part of Sweden who travels across the country on a back of a goose. By mixing historical and geographical facts, Lagerlöf created an educational adventure story appealing to children and adults. The two-part novel became Lagerlöf’s most famous work, and it has been translated into over 30 languages and adapted into various films and TV shows worldwide. On 10 December 1909, 51 years old Lagerlöf was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first female Nobel laureate in Literature. Over the years, Lagerlöf became involved with the women’s suffrage movement and was a speaker for the National Association for Women’s Suffrage while continuing to publish her work. However, the outbreak of WWI disturbed her deeply, and during those years, she focused her time and effort on raising funds for charitable causes, especially for refugee children. When the war ended, Lagerlöf returned to writing and published the novel Mårbacka in 1922, named after her childhood home; this book was the first of three autobiographical books. Three years later, she began publishing her historical trilogy – Löwensköldska Ringen (1925), Charlotte Löwensköld (1927), and Anna Svärd (1928). When WWII erupted, Lagerlöf’s creativity once again declined. In March 1940, she suffered a stroke and died a few days later at 81. Read more...

Elisabeth Kübler was born in Zürich, Switzerland. At 5, she was hospitalized with pneumonia and had her first experience with death when her roommate died. It led her to believe that since death is an inevitable part of life, one should be ready to face it with peace and dignity. During WW2, 13 years old Kübler-Ross worked as a laboratory assistant for refugees. Determined to become a doctor, despite her father’s objection, she left home at 16 to work as a doctor’s apprentice while volunteering in hospitals, gaining medical experience, and aiding refugees. When the war ended, she traveled through recovering Europe, doing relief work and helping rebuild communities hurt by the war. The harrowing stories she heard from the survivors led her to dedicate her life to helping others. Another significant impact on her life course occurred when visiting the Majdanek concentration camp in 1946. She noticed that the walls in the children’s barracks were covered with butterflies carved by fingernails and pebbles; it influenced her thinking about the end of life. On her return to Switzerland, she studied medicine at the University of Zurich and met her husband, Emanuel Robert Ross, an American medical student. In 1958, a year after the couple’s graduation, they moved to the US, where she interned at Community Hospital in Glen Cove, Long Island. Later, she was a resident at the psychiatric ward of the Manhattan State Hospital and worked on a treatment for terminal patients. There, she became aware of the neglect and abuse of the imminently dying, ignored by the medical staff. She established a program focusing on individual care for the terminally ill, which improved the mental health of over 90% of her patients. In 1962, Kübler-Ross began to work as a junior faculty member at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. For the first time, she interviewed a terminally ill young woman in front of a roomful of medical students, educating them that the desire of a dying human was to be understood and not ignored due to their condition. Two years later, she was appointed an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, focusing on the psychological treatment of terminally ill patients suffering from anxiety. She continued to work toward changing the approach of the medical staff to terminally ill patients by organizing seminars and interviews with terminally ill patients, caregivers, ministers, and people who worked with this community, educating them on how to approach the subject of death with terminally ill patients. Over time, especially after a Life magazine article about her published in 1969, Kübler-Ross’s work received publicity, leading her to focus solely on her work. That same year, she published her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying, introducing the five stages of grief. Scholarly known as the “Kübler-Ross model,” the theory suggests that the adjustment pattern comprises five steps when facing death – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The model has since evolved into The Kübler-Ross Change Curve, becoming a training method for employees in change and loss. During the 1970s, Kübler-Ross became a prominent figure in the hospice care movement, traveling worldwide and establishing hospice and palliative care programs. She also co-founded the American Holistic Medical Association and built a healing center in Escondido, California, named Shanti Nilaya (Final Home of Peace). At the time, she became interested in near-death experiences and served on the Advisory Board of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. In the 1980s, Kübler-Ross began to work with AIDS patients who got often discriminated against for their illness. Soon, she realized that despite the common perception that AIDS only affects homosexual men, women and children also contracted the disease, leading her to focus her work mainly on AIDS patients and children facing death. In 1995, at 69, she retired to Arizona after a series of strokes, stopped treating patients, and wrote books about dealing with death. With her work, Kübler-Ross has revolutionized the care of the terminally ill and changed the approach toward pain control and death. She helped to found dozens of programs for the terminally ill, including palliative care and hospice care facilities, and pioneered the movement of “treat the dying with dignity.” She died at the age of 78. Read more...

Jovita Idar was born in Laredo, Texas. Her parents advocated for Mexican Americans’ civil rights, and she and her seven siblings grew up in a socially and politically active household. Idar attended the Methodist Holding Institute in Laredo, earning her teaching certificate in 1903. Afterward, she moved to Los Ojuelos, where she taught Chicano children (Mexican-Americans with no Anglo heritage). There, she experienced the segregation and poor conditions of this community. Upon the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Idar resigned from her teaching position and returned to Laredo to work in her father’s newspaper, La Crónica (The Chronicle), which advocated for Mexican-American rights. Using a pseudonym, she focused on the loss of Mexican culture and the use of the Spanish language, Mexican-Americans’ poor living and working conditions, and lynching. She also used this platform to promote women’s suffrage and wrote articles encouraging women to vote. In 1911, the Idar family organized the First Mexican Congress to unite Mexicans to fight injustice. That same year, she founded and served as the first president of the feminist organization La Liga Feminil Mexicaista (the League of Mexican Women), which encouraged women to break out of the domestic sphere, offered study sessions for women, and established bilingual schools for children. Over time, the organization provided food and clothes to those in need. She also founded the El Etudiante, a bilingual education newspaper for teachers which offered practical methods for bilingual education. During the Mexican Revolution in 1913, 28 years old Idar crossed the border to help people injured in the attack on the city of Nuevo Laredo. She joined the La Cruz Blanca (the White Cross) and volunteered as a nurse. In 1914, on her return to the US, she began to write for the El Progreso newspaper. Following a criticizing article she published about US President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to send US troops to the border, the Texas Rangers came to newspaper offices to shut it down. However, Idar argued that per the First Amendment, the newspaper could publish opinion articles and physically block the entrance to the office. The Texas Rangers left but returned the next day while Idar was away and destroyed the newspaper’s presses. The incident did not hold her back, and she continued to publish her articles in other papers. Several months afterward, her father died, and she became the editor of La Crónica. Two years later, she founded another paper called Evolución. In 1917, at 32, she married Bartolo Juárez, and soon after, they moved to San Antonio, Texas. There, she became active in the Democratic Party, co-founded with her husband the Democratic Club, and served as editor of the Methodist Church publication El Heraldo Cristiano. She continued to promote equal rights for women and established a free kindergarten. She also volunteered as a translator at the county hospital and taught hygiene and childcare classes to women. She died at 61 from a pulmonary hemorrhage caused by advanced tuberculosis. Read more...

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, then in the Kingdom of Hungary. Her father was an Indian Punjabi Sikh aristocrat scholar, and her mother was a Hungarian-Jewish opera singer. In 1921, when she was eight, the family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla, India. From a young age, Sher-Gil showed talent in painting but started her formal training only when arriving in India. She also learned piano and violin, and within a year of their arrival, she played in concerts at Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre. In 1924, at 11, she moved with her mother to Italy for a year, where she attended an art school in Florence and found inspiration in the works of the great Italian masters. At 16, she returned to Europe to get training as a painter in Paris. First, she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later at the École des Beaux-Arts. At the time, she drew inspiration from Western art, especially the post-impressionism style, and included self-portraits, portraits of friends and classmates, still life, nudes, and Parisian life. At 19, she had her breakthrough with her painting Young Girls, for which she was awarded a gold medal and gained membership at the Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris, the youngest ever and the only Asian to become a member. In 1934, longings drew her back to India, and three years later, she embarked on a tour to South India to discover and explore her Indian roots. Inspired by the people and the scenery, especially the wall paintings of the Ajanta Caves, Sher-Gil began to incorporate her Western techniques with the Indian aesthetic. This new innovative style separated her from her contemporaries, particularly her use of colors, contrasting the pale tones of Bengal art. By then, Sher-Gil claimed to have found her ‘artistic mission,’ which was expressing the life of the Indian people through the canvas, as can be seen in her South Indian trilogy – Brahmacharis, Bride’s Toilet, and South Indian Villagers Going to Market. At 25, she married her Hungarian first cousin, Dr. Viktor Egan, and they settled near her paternal family in Saraya, in what is today Uttar Pradesh. There, she focused on rural life and began experimenting with the 17th-century Mughal miniatures painting style, as seen in her works In the Ladies, Village Scene, and Siesta. In 1941, Sher-Gil and her husband moved to Lahore, where she worked on her first major solo exhibition. She became ill only a few days before the show’s opening and slipped into a comma. She died a few days later, at the age of 28. Sher-Gil’s artistic style has influenced generations of Indian artists, and she is considered one of the significant avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century. Read more...

Helena Petrovna Hahn von Rottenstern was born into an aristocratic family in Yekaterinoslav, then part of the Russian Empire. Her father served as a Russian Royal Horse Artillery captain, and the family had to move frequently around the Empire. From a young age, she was drawn to spiritualism and showed interest in Eastern philosophy. At 17, she married a forty years old man named Nikifor Vladimirovich Blavatsky, but soon after the wedding, she escaped. Instead of returning home, she embarked on a three-decade journey in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. During her travels, especially while in India and Tibet, Blavatsky met various Hindu gurus who taught her how to improve and control her psychic powers, which include telepathy, clairaudience (the ability to gain information through six senses), the ability to control the consciousness of others, and the ability to project astral bodies and giving them the appearance of being in two places at once. In 1873, at 42, Blavatsky arrived in New York City and met the philosopher Henry Steel Olcott. Two years later, they co-founded the Theosophical Society. This organization promoted the pantheistic philosophical-religious system of theosophy, which argues that transcending human consciousness can lead to a deeper spiritual reality. In 1877, Blavatsky published her first major work, Isis Unveiled, in which she criticized science and religion and claimed that mystical experience is the way to achieve true spiritual insight. The book was a sensation and sold out in only two days. In 1879, Blavatsky and Olcott traveled to India and established the Theosophical Society headquarters at Adyar in 1882. It still serves as the society’s international headquarters of its seventy branches. She also founded and edited the society’s journal, The Theosophist. In 1885, due to health issues, Blavatsky, who became Madame Blavatsky, left India and settled in London. At the time, the media claimed she was a fraud, bringing her reputation as a spiritualist to a halt. She claimed her innocence and focused on writing, which resulted in her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. Published in 1888, Blavatsky spread through two volumes the origin and development of the universe and humanity. Although often criticized, Blavatsky, through her writings, unveiled to the Western world the Eastern philosophies and religions, their symbolism and metaphysics, and their practical application to daily life and way of thought. Read more...