Edith Ellis
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Edith Mary Oldham Ellis (née Lees; 9 March 1861 – 14 September 1916) was an English writer and women's rights activist. She was married to the early sexologist Havelock Ellis.
Biography
Ellis was born on 9 March 1861 in Newton, Lancashire. She was the only child of Samuel Oldham Lees, a landowner, and his wife Mary Laetitia, née Bancroft. She was born prematurely after her mother sustained a head injury during pregnancy and she died when Ellis was an infant. In December 1868, her father married Margaret Ann (Minnie) Faulkner and in time she had a younger half-brother.[1] She did not get on well with her father or his new wife. She was educated at a convent school in 1873 until her father realised that she was taking a strong interest in the Catholic faith. She was removed from the school and sent to another.[1]
She joined the Fellowship of the New Life and she briefly worked with Ramsay MacDonald when they both served as secretaries to the Fellowship.[1] She met Havelock Ellis at a meeting in 1887.[2] The couple married in November 1891.
From the beginning, their marriage was unconventional; she was openly lesbianScript error: No such module "Unsubst". and at the end of the honeymoon Ellis went back to his bachelor rooms. She had several affairs with women, which her husband was aware of.[3] Their open marriage was the central subject in Havelock Ellis's autobiography, My Life (1939).
Her first novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, was published in 1898.Template:Sfn Around this time Edith began a relationship with Lily Kirkpatrick,[4] an Irish artist based in St Ives; Kirkpatrick died in June 1903.[5]
Ellis had a nervous breakdown in March 1916 and died of diabetes that September. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. James Hinton: a Sketch, her biography of surgeon James Hinton, was published posthumously in 1918.Template:Sfn
Works
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- My Cornish Neighbours (1906)
- Kit's Woman (U.S. title: Steve's Woman) (1907)
- The Subjection of Kezia (1908)
- Attainment (1909)
- Three Modern Seers (1910)
- The Imperishable Wing (1911)
- The Lover's Calendar: An Anthology (ed) (1912)
- Love-Acre (1914)
- Love in Danger (1915)
- The Mothers (1915)
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- The New Horizon in Love and Life (1921)
References
Further reading
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- Pages with script errors
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- 1861 births
- 1916 deaths
- 19th-century English women writers
- 19th-century English writers
- 19th-century English novelists
- 20th-century English women writers
- 20th-century English novelists
- English women's rights activists
- English feminists
- English non-fiction writers
- English women novelists
- Lesbian feminists
- British lesbian writers
- Victorian novelists
- Members of the Women Writers' Suffrage League