Swami Vivekananda                           

Nivedita wrote in 1904 to a friend about her decision to follow swami Vivekananada as a result of her meeting him in England in November 1895:

'Suppose he had not come to London that time! Life would have been like a headless dream, for I always knew that I was waiting for something. I always said that a call would come. And it did. But if I had known more of life, I doubt whether, when the time came, I should certainly have recognized it.

Fortunately, I knew little and was spared that torture....Always I had this burning voice within, but nothing to utter. How often and often I sat down, pen in hand, to speak, and there was no speech! And now there is no end to it! As surely I am fitted to my world, so surely is my world in need of me, waiting — ready. The arrow has found its place in the bow. But if he had not come! If he had meditated, on the Himalayan peaks!...I, for one, had never been here.'

I met ….Miss Margaret Noble, the gifted young Irishwoman to whom Vivekananda had given the beautifully appropriate name of Nivedita, the Offered One, one dedicated and consecrated to the service of India . I first met Sister Nivedita at Srinagar in Kashmir and next at Lahore where I saw a great deal of her. And again in Calcutta where she came to my house more than once. I took her through the slums of Lahore and showed her the Ramlila,* which greatly interested her. She made eager inquiries about everything relating to India . She was in splendid health when she first came out to India , but the austerities which she practised affected her health, and she rapidly spent herself and was spent in the service of India . Of her fine intellect and gift of literary expression she has left abiding evidence in her exquisite books.

- Nagendra Nath Gupta
(Source: Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda)

"Her portrait, at the period of her sailing," (on the Golconda w Swami Vivekananda June 20 - July 31. 1899) her friend Eric Hammond, who was also an admirer of Swami Vivekananda, wrote, "shows us a young but distinctive woman with luminous grey-blue eyes, with hair of light golden brown, with a complexion radiant in its clearness, with a smile ingratiating and alluring. Of medium height; alert in every muscle and movement, eager, enterprising, dauntless."

Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda by Sister Nivedita

Letters of Sister Nivedita

Reminiscences of Sister Nivedita

Sister Nivedita's sketch of her room