His commonplace books of reveal intensive reading and a larger interest in natural science. Hinton's exposition gave the questing Ellis a belief in the inherent righteousness of the search for artistic and scientific truth.
The best avenue for his search, Ellis thought, was a medical and not a clerical career. He resolved to return to England and sailed in La Hogue in January On 27 February he confided in his diary: 'These three years I have spent in Australia seem to me like those three during which Paul was in Arabia'. In while studying medicine at St Thomas's Hospital, London, he began editing the 'Mermaid' series of dramatists and then the 'Contemporary Science' series.
In his six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex appeared; his other publications include Man and Woman , Little Essays of Love and Virtue and Impressions and Comments , 3 volumes In he married Edith Oldham Lees, authoress.
A photograph of Sparkes Creek, taken by his Australian friend Marjorie Ross, stood by his bedside in his last years. Ellis died without issue on 8 July Related Items. Discover key events and debates that shaped the Modernist movement.
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They maintained separate incomes and often lived apart, with Edith satisfying her emotional and sexual passions as a lesbian. Ellis published his major work, Studies in the Psychology of Sex over a long period —, with a seventh, supplementary, volume in The initial volume, Sexual Inversion, was a collaboration with the gay author John Addington Symons who had died in and was the first serious study of homosexuality published in Britain. The first English printing of the book in London, by Wilson and MacMillan a fictitious imprint for von Weissenfeld , was withdrawn before publication by Symonds' literary executor, acting on instructions from his widow.
Later titles in this groundbreaking and influential work were then published in the US. Phyllis Grosskurth has argued: "Sexual Inversion was an unprecedented book.
Never before had homosexuality been treated so soberly, so comprehensively, so sympathetically. To read it today is to read the voice of common sense and compassion; to read it then was, for the great majority, to be affronted by a deliberate incitement to vice of the most degrading kind That such sexual proclivity is not determined by suggestion, accident, or historical conditioning is apparent, he argues, from the fact that it is widespread among animals and that there is abundant evidence of its prevalence among various nations at all periods of history.
As one biographer, Jeffrey Weeks , pointed out: "Ellis's aim was to demonstrate that homosexuality or inversion, his preferred term was not a product of peculiar national vices, or periods of social decay, but a common and recurrent part of human sexuality, a quirk of nature, a congenital anomaly. The birth-control campaigner, Marie Stopes , described reading it as "like breathing a bag of soot; it made me feel choked and dirty for three months.
George Bedborough , the secretary of the Legitimation League , was arrested on 31st May and charged with selling Sexual Inversion. The arresting officer, John Sweeney, later admitted that the objective was to destroy what they believed was an anarchist organisation as well as removing obscene books for sale: "we were convinced that we should at one blow kill a growing evil in the shape of a vigorous campaign of free love and Anarchism, and at the same time discover the means by which the country was being flooded with books of the psychology type.
Shaw argued: "The prosecution of Mr. Bedborough for selling Mr. Havelock Ellis's book is a masterpiece of police stupidity and magisterial ignorance In Germany and France the free circulation of such works as the one of Mr.
Havelock Ellis's now in question has done a good deal to make the public in those countries understand that decency and sympathy are as necessary in dealing with sexual as with any other subjects. In England we still repudiate decency and sympathy and make virtues of blackguards and ferocity.
In court the book was described as being a "certain lewd, wicked, bawdy, scandalous libel". The judge told George Bedboroug : "So long as you do not touch this filthy work again with your hands and so long as you lead a respectable life, you will hear no more of this.
But if you choose to go back to your evil ways, you will be brought up before me, and it will be my duty to send you to prison for a very long time. Havelock Ellis commented that the novel was "a real work of art, well planned and well balanced, original and daring, the genuinely personal outcome of its author, alike in its humour and its firm, deep grip of the great sexual problems it is concerned with, centering around the relations of a wife to a husband who by accident has become impotent During this period Edith began a relationship with Lily, an artist from Ireland who lived in St.
In his autobiography, My Life , Ellis pointed out that: "Much as Edith always admired the clean, honest, reliable Englishwoman, there was yet, as I have already indicated, something in that type that was apt to jar on her in intimate intercourse; she craved something more gracious, less prudish, pure by natural instinct rather than by moral principle. In Lily she found the ideal embodiment of all her cravings. Edith was devastated when Lily died from Bright's Disease in June Havelock Ellis continued to work on Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
Bertrand Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell after the final volume was published: "I have read a good deal of Havelock Ellis on sex. It is full of things that everyone ought to know, very scientific and objective, most valuable and interesting.
What a folly it is the way people are kept in ignorance on sexual matters, even when they think they know every-thing. I think almost all civilized people are in some way what would be thought abnormal, and they suffer because they don't know that really ever so many people are just like them.
In Erotic Symbolism, The Mechanism of Detumescence Havelock Ellis discussed his "own germ of perversion" urolagina: "There is ample evidence to show that, either as a habitual or more usually an occasional act, the impulse to bestow a symbolic value on the act of urination in a beloved person, is not extremely uncommon; it has been noted of men of high intellectual distinction; it occurs in women as well as men; when existing in only a slight degree, it must be regarded as within the normal limits of variation of sexual emotion.
As Phyllis Grosskurth , the author of Havelock Ellis , has pointed out: "He invited her to tea the following week and was startled to find her so pretty and so comparatively young. At first she was overwhelmed by his patriarchal beauty and his refusal to make small talk. She was also surprised - as many others were on first meeting him - by his thin, high voice, so unexpected in a man of his size. Sanger fell in love with Ellis. She wrote in An Autobiography : "I was at peace, and content as I had never been before I was not excited as I went back through the heavy fog to my own dull little room.
My emotion was too deep for that. I felt as though I had been exalted into a hitherto undreamed-of world. Soon afterwards Sanger tried to turn it into a sexual relationship. Ellis wrote to her explaining "What I felt, and feel, is that by just being your natural spontaneous self you are giving me so much more than I can hope to give you.
You see, I am an extremely odd, reserved, slow undemonstrative person, whom it takes years and years to know. I have two or three very dear friends who date from 20 or 25 years back and they like me better now than they did at first and none of recent date. Edith Lees Ellis suffered from poor health in her forties. In March she suffered from a severe nervous breakdown and entered a local convent nursing home at Hayle in Cornwall. Soon afterwards she attempted suicide by throwing herself from the fourth floor.
Havelock Ellis wrote to Edward Carpenter : "Quite what she was feeling and thinking these last few days I do not know. It was some kind of despair. She has been despondent and self-reproachful as not having lived up to her ideals for some time past, and has lost her faith in things and in her spirit The condition has been fundamentally neurasthenia, with mental symptoms - distressing loss of will power and helplessness.
Edith was eventually released but was forced back to hospital and died of diabetes in September Havelock Ellis told Margaret Sanger : She was always a child, and through everything, a very lovable child, to the last.
Even friends whom she only made during the last few weeks are inconsolable at her loss. Havelock first met her to pay an outstanding bill. Havelock wrote back that "I feel sure that I am good for you, and I am sure that you suit me.
But as lover or a husband you would find me very disappointing. Stella Browne wrote to Margaret Sanger that "Ellis is looking better than I've seen him for some time: he seems slowly recovering from all he had to go through last year. They saw each other often but it was not now a romantic relationship.
I am sure she was quite reconciled herself, though still so full of vivid interest in life, that she went back to Africa to die He was a poet and scholar who had been killed during the First World War.
He was visited by Ella Winter , the translator of the book. She wrote in her autobiography, And Not to Yield : "He was an astonishing old man, extremely tall and imposing, with a large head, white hair, and a bushy square beard. He lived alone in a small flat and, to my surprise, made the tea and carried in the tray. He developed this habit, I supposed, when he interviewed women about their sex lives for his Psychology of Sex.
Presumably one talked more freely that way, but it gave me an eerie feeling. He did not ask me about my sex life. I was rather hurt. His biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth , has pointed out: "It was a great disappointment in terms of sales or critical reception.
In people's minds were too preoccupied with the war to pay much attention to it and the reviews tended to be either patronizing or outraged by the accounts of Edith's lesbianism and Ellis's urolagnia. We have never needed any explanations before, and that has always seemed so beautiful to me, and we seemed to understand instinctively. And that is why I've never explained things that perhaps needed explaining. This is specially so about Olive. I have never known anyone who was so beautiful and wonderful, or with whom I could be so much myself, and it is true enough that for years to be married to her seemed to me the one thing in the world that I longed for, but that is years ago.
We are sweet friends now and always will be; but to speak in the way you do of a "vital relationship" to her sounds to me very cruel. Because one has loved somebody who did not love one enough to make the deepest human relationship possible, is that a reason why one must always be left alone?
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