Anna Kingsford (née Annie Bonus; 16 September 1846 – 22 February 1888) was an English anti-vivisectionist, Theosophist, a proponent of vegetarianism and a women's rights campaigner.

[1] She 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.

[2] She 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.

[3] She 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 (1889).

[1] 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 Schröder.

[9][10] According to Maitland she was a "born seer," with a gift "for seeing apparitions and divining the characters and fortunes of people", something she reportedly learned to keep silent about.

[14] Having been left £700 a year by her father, she bought in 1872 The Lady's Own Paper, and took up work as its editor, which brought her into contact with some prominent women of the day, including the writer, feminist, and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe.

Claude Bernard (1813–1878), described as the "father of physiology", was working there, and famously said that "the physiologist is not an ordinary man: he is a scientist, possessed and absorbed by the scientific idea he pursues.

British anti-vivisectionists infiltrated the lectures in Paris of François Magendie, Bernard's teacher, who dissected dogs without anaesthesia, allegedly shouting at them—"Tais-toi, pauvre bête!"

The idea that it was so came strongly upon me one day when I was sitting in the Musée of the school, with my head in my hands, trying vainly to shut out of my ears the piteous shrieks and cries which floated incessantly towards me up the private staircase ... Every now and then, as a scream more heart-rending than the rest reached me, the moisture burst out on my forehead and on the palms of my hands, and I prayed, "Oh God, take me out of this Hell; do not suffer me to remain in this awful place.

[19] Alan Pert, one of her biographers, wrote that 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.

In July 1887, she settled in London in a house she and her husband rented at 15 Wynnstay Gardens, Kensington, and waited to die, although she remained mentally active.