[This blog post was originally published in the January 2024 newsletter for the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers, a research centre based at Canterbury Christ Church University].
For one so little known, Anna Kingsford’s life (1846-1888) can so easily tumble into narrative cliché. The dreamful girl who spoke to fairies in her childhood garden becoming the young woman who wrote an early feminist Essay on the Admission of Women to the Parliamentary Franchise (1868). The headstrong daughter of a successful merchant and shipowner who went against the wishes of her family to marry the cousin clergyman for love, rather than class or prospects. The short-term editor of a women’s periodical who then set out to become part of the first cohort of British women to earn a medical degree. The campaigner who then used this qualification and her oft commented upon dizzyingly good looks to argue against the vivisection of innocent animals and in favour of a fleshless diet. The woman whose nights were filled with dream-visions, which led her into the world of spiritualism and esoteric religiosity. All of this: the forceful nature, the independence of mind, and the strength shown in the face of a patriarchal world, which culminated in the ultimate fight with tuberculosis. Kingsford died in 1888 at the age of 41. So goes the narrative. However, we should remain aware of the problematic tangles within such narratives. The history is often messier.
It is a contention of mine (and others) that the clichés emerge because the main source of information about Kingsford is Edward Maitland’s Life of Anna Kingsford (1896). He was, in a word problematic now to our ears, described as her “protector” of sorts. A travelling companion and intellectual bon ami would perhaps be kinder to our ears; and it would get at the hint of ambiguity that surrounded their relationship. An ambiguity that was unfounded, but inevitable all the same. As a historian interested in Kingsford, I will never be able to forgive Maitland (1824-1897) for burning Kingsford’s unpublished papers in order to render his often rambling and frequently egotistical Life the definitive statement on her life as it was.
My feelings on the matter reflect those expressed by Kingsford’s friend, the feminist and journalist Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1935). Miller’s own unpublished memoir – she devoted an entire chapter to the “unique personality” of Kingsford – reveals a clear apprehension and general dislike for the older man. She was unimpressed by Kingsford’s turn towards the psychic and the esoteric and she clearly believed, no doubt correctly, that it was Maitland who fostered this side of her friend Anna. This turn was cemented in 1882 with the publication of The Perfect Way; Or, the Finding of Christ, a set of theosophical lectures delivered by the collaborators over the previous summer. A good feminist, though, Miller gave Kingsford the space to choose her own path and respected her agency in the matter. She was even good enough to wait until Maitland’s death in 1897 before she tore apart the portrait he had painted of her estranged friend: “this unhappy book […] what a melancholy display […] The Anna Kingsford that I knew, the clever, intelligent woman (the most beautiful creature that I have ever seen in my life, too), was absolutely non-existent in that book”.
It is this Millerian anxiety about Maitland’s portrait that, at least in part, informs my own approach to Kingsford within my PhD thesis. If the traditional, authoritative assessment of Kingsford’s life is contested to such an extent by Miller, what are the threads that can be pulled to spin another history? Homing in on her overarching mission as a defender of animals, I examine this in comparison to her own interactions with animals in a phenomenological animal-human biography. In doing so, another narrative emerges, hopefully one that both challenges and deepens the existing ones through a blending of the intellectual and material aspects of Kingsford’s living-alongside and becoming-with animals.
Her medical thesis, L’Alimentation Végétale de l’Homme, was translated and published as The Perfect Way in Diet (1881). It became, according to Miller, the foremost scientific publication to argue for a vegetarian diet in a manner both medical and ethical. (It was originally rejected by the examiners at the Paris Medical School for its implementation of moral arguments; these were hence stripped out, only to be reinserted for the published version). But it was not simply vegetarianism, Kingsford drafted articles and made speeches against the vogue of vivisection and wrote letters to the press arguing against seal hunting for furs. She avoided leather and wrote, also, against murderous millinery. The former of these led to her declaration at an 1882 vegetarian gathering that she had successfully obtained vegetable boots; a declaration that, in turn, led to a derisory verse being penned in the humorous magazine Fun. These extensions made her vegetarianism an embodied form of proto-veganism. She explicitly noted this wholistic character of her convictions when she wrote the following in a letter to The Standard:
Two or three years ago, when I used to lecture on the cruelties of scientific experiments, I remember feeling my ardour considerably damped by the not infrequent spectacle of ladies arrayed in sealskin jackets, seated in the front row of my audience, and applauding vigorously my protests against vivisection. (Letter to The Standard, 12 October, 1887).
However, she did defend the adornment of ostrich feathers – “obtainable without slaughter, and, I am assured, without cruelty” – and the use of wool as cruelty-free fashion, which complicates this sort of proto-vegan framing.
Instead, I read Kingsford’s vociferous attacks against the injustices faced by animals in light of her own animal companions and encounters. The ideal as forged through her lifelong companionship with guinea pigs, for example. Or her anger at seeing dogs ill-treated amongst the streets of Rome, when riding a cart through the Eternal City. I take these quotidian encounters as phenomenologically relevant to the woman she became and the ideas she espoused. It was sentimentalism that became principled objection. This sentimentalism can be traced back to her juvenilia which included the poetry collection River Reeds (1866), wherein the titular poem appears to betray a debt young Annie owed to the poetess who was perhaps an idol, Elizabth Barrett Browning. The principled objection (retaining, admittedly, that kernel of sentimentality) came in the early 1870s, when she decided on her path. According to Maitland, this is how she articulated herself at that moment of decision:
“[…] I do not love men and women. I dislike them too much to do them any good. They seem to be my natural enemies. It is not for them that I am taking up medicine and science, not to cure their ailments; but for the animals and for knowledge generally. I want to rescue the animals from cruelty and injustice, which are for me the worst, if not the only sins. And I can’t love both the animals and those who systematically ill-treat them. Can I, Rufus dear?” she exclaimed to her guinea-pig, and kissing it tenderly, as if to make some amends for the wrongs endured by its fellows at human hands.
Notes
The periodical that Kingsford was briefly editor and proprietor of was the Lady’s Own Paper. She ran the paper for a total of 12 issues between October and December 1872.
Florence Fenwick Miller’s unpublished memoir, An Uncommon Girlhood, is accessible as a microfilm copy at the Wellcome Collection in London, ref: GC/228.
For Miller’s obituary of Maitland, see: The Woman’s Signal (14 October 1897), 248.
“The Vegetable Boot”, Fun, June 28, 1882, 263.
Kingsford on ostrich feathers: “There are, however, certain feathers which are obtainable without slaughter, and, I am assured, without cruelty – ostrich feathers, the plumes being cut yearly from the birds, which are kept in large numbers on farms for the purpose and well treated.” Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, 17 September, 1887.
Final block quote: Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary, and Work, vol 1, 2nd edtn. (London: George Redway, 1896), 48.