| Edith Ellis | |
| Birth Name: | Edith Mary Oldham Lees |
| Birth Date: | 9 March 1861 |
| Birth Place: | Newton, Lancashire, England |
| Death Date: | (aged 55) |
| Death Place: | Paddington, London, England |
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.
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).
Her first novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, was published in 1898. 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.
. Phyllis Grosskurth. Havelock Ellis: a biography. 1980. Knopf. 978-0-394-50150-5. New York.