Impressions and Comments.

Bookseller Notes

A journal of the pioneering sexologist's intellectual and cultural life during 1912-13, inscribed by the author on the flyleaf: 'To my Wife from Havelock. 24 Sept. 1914'. Ellis married Edith Lees in 1891, the two having met at a meeting of The Fellowship of the New Life (from which the Fabian Society derived). Edith Ellis was a women's rights activist, and lectured and wrote on this and other themes linked to her socialist beliefs she was also a novelist, and the couple's unstinting admiration for one another's work was in inverse proportion to their sexual attraction. Both had numerous female sexual partners during its course. Edith Ellis died in 1916, from diabetes, having endured a long spell of deteriorating physical and mental health. The book subsequently passed into the ownership of Alice Callow, a close friend from her later years, who after her death founded the Edith Ellis Fellowship Society; as Lees had been for the Fellowship of the New Life, Callow was the first secretary of the Higher Thought Centre in South Kensington, where Edith Ellis spoke along with her friend, Edward Carpenter in her later years, when her interest in spiritualism and Sufism grew. An interesting association.