page_title: Edith Ellis
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Edith Ellis / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Lily, 1902
context_page_description: Edith Mary Oldham Ellis was an English writer and women's rights activist. She was married to the early sexologist Havelock Ellis.
context_section_description: Born in Manchester in 1861, Ellis' mother died when she was young and she was sent to a 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 (1939).
  Her first novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, was published in 1898. During this period Edith began a relationship with Lily, an artist from Ireland who lived in St Ives. Edith was devastated when Lily died from Bright's disease in June 1903.
  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.
caption: Lily, 1902
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