Blavatsky Hated Balls

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 5 pages

The shortest document in this batch and the most personal. It gathers excerpts from letters written in 1878 and 1879, printed in the Bombay Gazette in October 1884 and probably addressed to Hurrychund Chintamon, then president of the Bombay Arya Samaj. It opens with her own summary of the general verdict on her: that people say very justly she is as rude as a bear and as unfeeling as a hippopotamus.

What follows is the episode the title refers to. At barely sixteen she was being forced to attend a great ball at the Viceroy's, her protests ignored and her parents threatening to have her dressed for it by the servants if she would not go willingly — whereupon she deliberately plunged her leg into a kettle of boiling water and held it there until it was scalded raw, was lame for six months, and was never made to go to a ball again. The passage that follows is equally unguarded, on there being nothing of the woman in her, and on a childhood spent among the artillery soldiers of her father's regiment and then among Buddhist Kalmucks. Five pages, and more revealing of the person than anything else in the section.

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