Helen Keller was born in America in 1880. She became very ill and was blind and deaf by the time she was nineteen months old. She became mute as well shortly afterwards. When she was six, she began to rave instructions from a remarkable teacher called Anne Sullivan, who had herself suffered from a degree of blindness. Anne managed to teach Helen Keller to read, speak and write so well that in 1900. Helen went to Radcliffe College and graduated with the highest honours four years later. Helen wrote several books, travelled and lectured widely and helped many blind people at a time when very little was being done for people with such terrible handicaps.

Within months Keller had learnt to feel objects and associate them with words spelt out by finger signals on her palm, to read sentences by feeling raised words on cardboard, and to make her own sentences by arranging words in a frame. During 1888–90 she spent winters at the Perkins Institution learning Braille. Then she began a slow process of learning to speak under Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, also in Boston. She also learnt to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker while the words were simultaneously spelt out for her. At age 14 she enrolled in the Wright-Thompson School for the Deaf in New York City, and at 16 she entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. She won admission to Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated in 1904.