Bahaipedia:Today's featured individual/April 15

Violet McKinley (1882-1959) was a pioneer and Knight of Bahá’u’lláh named for pioneering to Cyprus. Born at Enfield, north of London, into the prosperous trading environment of the late Victorian epoch, Violet McKinley (née Watson) was blessed with two great spiritual advantages: an extremely delicate constitution, which kept the thought of the other world very close, and a persistently inquiring mind - she always wanted to know 'Why?' This condition was stimulated by an orthodox but solid education at home. Too frail to go to school, she had a continental governess for eight years, with hard study of the nineteenth century romantics: Schiller, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Heine, Lamartine, etc. Her study was conducted all in German on week, all in French the other, and this, coupled with a deep religious sense that had been instilled in her by a very narrow but thoroughly sincere and right minded nurse during her early childhood, developed a viewpoint totally unsympathetic to the shallow and materialistic background of her class and daily life.