Edith Ellis

Edith Lees & Havelock Ellis

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 lesbian 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).

Lily Kirkpatrick, 1902

Her first novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, was published in 1898.[4] During this period Edith began a relationship with Lily Kirkpatrick,[5] an artist from Ireland who lived in St Ives. Edith was devastated when Lily died from Bright's disease in June 1903.[6]

Plaque dedicated to Ellis and her husband at Golders Green Crematorium

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.[7]

• Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll. London: University Press. 1898.
• 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)
• James Hinton: A Sketch. Stanley Paul. 1918.
• The New Horizon in Love and Life (1921)

• Grosskurth, Phyllis (1980). Havelock Ellis: a biography. New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-50150-5.
• Wallace, Jo-Ann (2000). "The Case of Edith Ellis". In Stevens, Hugh; Howlett, Caroline (eds.). Modernist Sexualities. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-5161-6.