Virginia Woolf is the Grumpy Vegan’s favorite writer. Her diaries and correspondence — and not, of course, to forget her literature — reveal a fascinating, creative and brilliant mind. Her life, too, was equally compelling. Her husband, Leonard, recounted their life together in a series of interesting biographies.
One of Virginia’s most intense relationships was with Vita Sackville-West, an author of many titles (fiction, biography, travel writing, poetry) but is perhaps mostly remembered — as a writer — for her garden journalism and writing. She created with her husband, Harold Nicolson, at their property, Sissinghurst Castle, surely the most beautiful of all English gardens. Sadly, only visited once by the Grumpy Vegan on a dreary overcast day but yet it still managed to shine brilliantly. In an exhibit room about the house and gardens and lives and loves of Harold and Vita (both gay, incidentally) you come across the printing press Virginia and Leonard used to produce books they published under the name of the Hogarth Press. (A must-read is Julia Briggs’ Virginia Woolf–an Inner Life to learn more about the creative process of writing and living.)
Anyway, recently, reading Vita’s 1939 collection of garden columns, “Country Notes,” the discovery was made of a couple of columns she’d written on animal cruelty, bloodsports and vivisection. They display a sharp, analytical mind. Clearly, she abhorred animal cruelty, including fox hunting, which she banned from Sissinghurst Castle. But her writings on vivisection reveal an informed, sensitive finessing of the issue where she reluctantly accepted the need for highly regulated animal research under the most strict of circumstances. This is, of course, a view not shared by the Grumpy Vegan but couldn’t help but think that if this fine line had been put into law what a difference it would have made in doing away with the vast majority of it.
