Lakshmibai Tilak was an illiterate girl of eleven when she was married to Narayan Wamanrao Tilak, a seventeen year old educated young man, who later revolutionized Maharashtra with his poems. His attemps at educating her have been described humourously by Lakshmibai herself. Later, when she finally learnt her alphabet , she would scribble on the floor when inspiration came to her in the middle of the night and the following morning she would request either her son or the boy-poet Thombre to transcribe it on paper. She became so successful a writer that she wrote Smritichtre, as well as a good deal of her husband's unfinished epic on the life of Jesus Christ, Kristayan.