Leah Leneman

If you want to be a good vegan, Leah Leneman's name is one of the names you should know. Leah Leneman, who I had thought was Scottish, was actually originally from the US. She was one of the original vegan serial cookbook authors in the time before fancy schmantzy vegan cookbooks were on every corner. She (to me) was (and still is) one of those things you (i.e. I) just have to love about England - when, well, in fact she was an American who lived in and loved Scotland. 

Among other things you and I didn't know is that she was a historian who wrote, among many other things, about cool things like divorce. (I just stumbled across this great "Leah Leneman (1944–99): an appreciation, by Stana Nenadic".) 

Some of her writings:

• Living in Atholl: a social history of the estates, 1685–1785 (1986),
• Sexuality and Social Control, Scotland 1660–1780 (1989)
• Fit for Heroes: Land settlement in Scotland after World War I (1989)
• In the Service of Life: the story of Elsie Inglis and the Scottish women’s hospitals (1994)
• A Guid Cause: the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (1995)
• Sin in the City (1998) 
• Girls in Trouble (1998)
• Alienated Affections: the Scottish experience of divorce and separation, 1684–1830 (1998) 

Sadly Leah Leneman died in 1999, on the 26th of December, almost exactly 13 years ago, at the age of only 55, after a long struggle with breast cancer. 

Read how cool she was in this interview with Leah Leneman in Vegan Views from 1985. 

She must have written this shortly before her death: "If the health benefits cause people to become vegan, then that is all to the good, but if that remains their sole reason for not eating animal products, then many of them will become disillusioned and give up." (The Vegan, Winter 1999 issue, page 34, see picture)