1. Anna Kingsford was an English anti-vivisectionist, Theosophist, a proponent of vegetarianism and a women's rights campaigner.
20 Facts About Anna Kingsford
1. 2.
Anna Kingsford was one of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine, after Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and the only medical student at the time to graduate without having experimented on a single animal.
3.
Anna Kingsford pursued her degree in Paris, graduating in 1880 after six years of study, so that she could continue her animal advocacy from a position of authority.
4.
Anna Kingsford founded the Food Reform Society that year, travelling within the UK to talk about vegetarianism, and to Paris, Geneva, and Lausanne to speak out against animal experimentation.
5.
Anna Kingsford said she received insights in trance-like states and in her sleep; these were collected from her manuscripts and pamphlets by her lifelong collaborator Edward Maitland, and published posthumously in the book, Clothed with the Sun.
6.
Anna Kingsford's writing was virtually unknown for over 100 years after Maitland published her biography, The Life of Anna Kingsford, though Helen Rappaport wrote in 2001 that her life and work are being studied.
7.
Anna Kingsford was born in Maryland Point, Stratford, now part of east London but then in Essex, to John Bonus, a wealthy merchant, and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Schroder.
8.
Anna Kingsford's brother John Bonus was a physician and vegetarian.
9.
Anna Kingsford's brother Edward became rector of Hulcott in Buckinghamshire and her brother Joseph was a major general.
10.
Anna Kingsford's brother Charles William Bonus was an underwriter.
11.
Deborah Rudacille writes that Anna Kingsford enjoyed foxhunting, until one day she reportedly had a vision of herself as the fox.
12.
Anna Kingsford married her cousin, Algernon Godfrey Kingsford in 1867 when she was 21, giving birth to a daughter, Eadith, a year later.
13.
Anna Kingsford contributed articles to the magazine Penny Post from 1868 to 1873.
14.
In 1873, Anna Kingsford met the writer Edward Maitland, a widower, who shared her rejection of materialism.
15.
Anna Kingsford was distraught over the sights and sounds of the animal experiments she saw.
16.
Anna Kingsford adopted a vegetarian diet on the advice of her brother John Bonus.
17.
Alan Pert, one of her biographers, wrote that Anna Kingsford was caught in torrential rain in Paris in November 1886 on her way to the laboratory of Louis Pasteur, one of the most prominent vivisectionists of the period.
18.
Anna Kingsford reportedly spent hours in wet clothing and developed pneumonia, then pulmonary tuberculosis.
19.
Anna Kingsford travelled to the Riviera and Italy, sometimes with Maitland, at other times with her husband, hoping in vain that a different climate would help her recover.
20.
Anna Kingsford died on 22 February 1888, aged 41, and was buried in the churchyard of Saint Eata's, an 11th-century church in Atcham by the River Severn, her husband's church.