Edith Ellis

Who was Edith Ellis?

Edith Mary Oldham Ellis was a British writer and women's rights activist. She was married to the early sexologist Havelock Ellis.

Her mother died when she was young and she was sent to a Manchester convent in 1873. She joined the Fellowship of the New Life and met Havelock Ellis in 1887 at a meeting. The couple married in November 1891.

From the beginning, their marriage was unconventional; she was openly lesbian and at the end of the honeymoon he went back to his bachelor rooms. She had several affairs with women, which her husband was aware of. Their open marriage was the central subject in Havelock Ellis's autobiography, My Life.

Her first novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, was published in 1898. Ellis had a nervous breakdown in March 1916 and died of diabetes that September. James Hinton: a Sketch, her biography of surgeon James Hinton was published posthumously in 1918.