We have never needed any explanations before, and that has always seemed so beautiful to me, and we seemed to understand instinctively. And that is why I've never explained things that perhaps needed explaining. This is specially so about Olive. I have never known anyone who was so beautiful and wonderful, or with whom I could be so much myself, and it is true enough that for years to be married to her seemed to me the one thing in the world that I longed for, but that is years ago. We are sweet friends now and always will be; but to speak in the way you do of a "vital relationship" to her sounds to me very cruel. Because one has loved somebody who did not love one enough to make the deepest human relationship possible, is that a reason why one must always be left alone? I only explain this to show that I am really free in every sense - perhaps freer than you - and that I haven't been so unfair to you as you seem to think. The thing I wanted to tell you about that has been bothering me was this: I had to decide whether it was possible for me to return the passionate love of someone whom I felt a good deal of sympathy with, and even a little passionate towards. She would have left me absolutely free, and it hurt me to have to torture her. But I had no difficulty in deciding; the real, deep and mutual understanding, which to me is more than passion, wasn't there, and the thought I had constantly in my mind was that my feeling towards you, although I do not feel passionate towards you (as I thought you understood), was one that made any other relationship impossible. I wonder if you will understand that.

Now I've got to explain what I feel about our relationship to each other - and that will be all. Perhaps the only thing that needs explaining is about the absence of passionate feeling. I have always told you that I felt so restful and content with you, that the restless, tormenting, passionate feeling wasn't there; and I have seen that you didn't feel passionate towards me, but have said over and over again that you didn't believe in passion. So we arc quite equal, and why should we quarrel about it? Let us just be natural with each other-leaving the other feeling to grow up or not, as it will. It is possible to me to come near you and to show you my heart, and it is possible to you to come near me; and (to me at least) that is something so deep and so rare that it makes personal tenderness natural and inevitable, or at all events right.

In reference to marriage: I said (or meant) that I did not think either you or I were the kind of people who could safely tie ourselves legally to anyone; true marriage, as I understand it, is a union of soul and body so close and so firmly established that one feels it will last as long as life lasts. For people to whom that has come to exist as an everyday fact of their lives, then the legal tie may safely follow; but it cannot come beforehand. I have seen so much of unhappy marriages - which all started happily - and I do not think anything on earth could induce me to tie myself legally to anyone with whom I had not - perhaps for years - been so united in body and soul that separation would be intolerable. Surely, Edith, you, too, understand that you can't promise to give away your soul for life, that you can't promise to love for ever beforehand. Haven't you learnt this from your own experience?

I don't think I've anything more to explain. Now it's your turn, and then we'll have a rest from explaining. I've told you simply and honestly how I stand towards you. I took it for granted before that everything I have said was what you could have said too. Tell me where you don't feel with me, and tell me quite honestly, as I have told you, how you feel towards me. We aren't so young that we need fear to face the naked facts of life simply and frankly. You know how much you are to me - exactly how much. Putting aside Olive, I have never loved anyone so deeply and truly, and with the kind of love that seemed to make everything possible and pure, and even mv relationship to Olive has not seemed so beautiful and unalloyed as my relationship to you. It has seemed to me that we might perhaps go on becoming nearer and nearer, and dearer and dearer, to each other as time went on. My nature isn't of the passionately impetuous kind (though it's very sensuous) and mv affections grow slowly, and die hard, if at all. Even as it is, we shall be dear comrades as long as we live. You have hurt me rather, but I don't mind because there mustn't be anything false, and our relationship is strong enough to bear a good deal of tugging.

The Fellowship of the New Life was founded (I believe I had a considerable finger in writing its manifesto) to promote the general social renovation of the world on the broadest and highest lines, seeking inspiration in its Goethean motto: "Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen resolut zu leben." A little later, as it grew, the Fabian Society, with a more practical and political programme, broke off from it, and with the aid of men who have since attained fame, notably Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, it played the leading part in permeating England with an anglicised form of Socialism. It is in accordance with the irony of human affairs that "Fabianism" should indirectly have been produced by a man so alien to its spirit as Thomas Davidson. I, who had no political interests, while sympathetic with the Fabians, decided to remain with the parent body, though as I came to realise the inevitable limitations of the movement, my more active participation diminished and ceased, Edith Lees - my wife to be - who had been introduced by Chubb simultaneously becoming its chief organiser and guiding spirit. It continued its quietly influential existence for some years (publishing a little paper called Seed-time and holding meetings) until after Edith Lees's marriage, when it peacefully expired.

The prosecution of Mr. Bedborough for selling Mr. Havelock Ellis's book is a masterpiece of police stupidity and magisterial ignorance....

My own attention was called to the subject many years ago by the passing of a sentence of twenty years' penal servitude on a harmless elderly gentleman who had been ill-advised enough to plead guilty to a piece of folly which involved no danger whatever to society. At that time I was as ignorant as most people are on the subject; but the sentence so shocked my common humanity that I made an attempt to get the press to protest. I then discovered that the fear of becoming suspected of personal reasons for desiring a change in the law in this matter, makes every Englishman an abject coward, truckling to the vilest vulgar superstitions, and professing in public and in print views which have not the slightest resemblance to those which he expresses in private conversation with educated and thoughtful men. This hypocrisy is much more degrading to the public than the subject of Mr. Havelock Ellis's book can possibly he, because it is universal instead of being accidental and peculiar. In Germany and France the free circulation of such works as the one of Mr. Havelock Ellis's now in question has done a good deal to make the public in those countries understand that decency and sympathy are as necessary in dealing with sexual as with any other subjects. In England we still repudiate decency and sympathy and make virtues of blackguards and ferocity...

It is fortunate that the police have been silly enough to select for their attack a writer whose character stands so high as that of Mr. Havelock Ellis; and I have no doubt that if we do our duty in the matter, the prosecution, by ignominiously failing, will end by doing more good than harm.

The said book was written by me as the result of many years scientific study, investigation and observation and was written purely in the interests of science and scientific investigation and to the best of my ability in a scientific spirit. He said work is the first volume of a series of works which I am engaged in writing being studies in the psychology of sex. It deals with the subject of sexual abnormalities and in order to properly treat of these matters from a Scientific point of view and to arrive at a conclusion with regard to the remedies for the practises dealt with (which frequently lead to crime disease and insanity) it has been necessary to instance cases which have actually occurred. The matter has been treated to the best of my ability in the least possible objectionable manner and with the sole object of elucidating the truth and arriving at a satisfactory conclusion as to remedial treatment. The general scope and objects of the book appears from the prefaces and also from the concluding chapter and I crave to refer to those portions of the book on those points.

I still went to the Fellowship's meetings from time to time and I rarely failed to join in its occasional excursions into the country. It was on one of these that I first saw Edith Lees. She, it appears, asked Chubb who that man was. "That is Havelock Ellis," he replied impressively. But she was not impressed; it seemed to her that my clothes were ill-made, and that was a point on which she always remained sensitive. We were, however, introduced and walked along together for a few minutes, talking of indifferent subjects. She was a small, compact, active person, scarcely five feet in height, with a fine skin, a singularly well-shaped head with curly hair, square, powerful hands, very small feet, and - her most conspicuous feature on a first view - large rather pale blue eyes. I cannot say that the impression she made on me on that occasion was specially sympathetic; it so happens that the dominating feature of her face, the pale blue eyes, is not one that appeals to me, for to me green or grey eyes (I believe because one is drawn to those of one's own type) are the congenial eyes, and I never grew really to admire them, though to many they were peculiarly beautiful and fascinating, "pools of blue-bells," as one friend wrote after her death, "between the gold of the furze in flower"; it was always her beautiful voice that most appealed to me, and when I came to know her more intimately the lovely expressiveness of her eloquent under-lip, as I used to call it. On her side, as I say, the impression was also not specially favourable, if not indeed unfavourable. It so happened that in the course of our walk through a remote district we came upon a little chapel which we entered. In a playful mood I began to toll the bell. This, it appears, rather jarred on her serious humour - more serious than in later life - and she regarded it as a feeble joke in bad taste. We had no further conversation that I recall. Indeed, during the next two or three years I came little in personal contact with her. I remember once going up to shake hands with her just before a meeting of the Fellowship of which she became the secretary in 1889, but nothing more. No doubt I was drifting further and further away from the Fellowship.

I have read a good deal of Havelock Ellis on sex. It is full of things that everyone ought to know, very scientific and objective, most valuable and interesting. What a folly it is the way people are kept in ignorance on sexual matters, even when they think they know every-thing. I think almost all civilized people are in some way what would be thought abnormal, and they suffer because they don't know that really ever so many people are just like them.

There is ample evidence to show that, either as a habitual or more usually an occasional act, the impulse to bestow a symbolic value on the act of urination in a beloved person, is not extremely uncommon; it has been noted of men of high intellectual distinction; it occurs in women as well as men; when existing in only a slight degree, it must be regarded as within the normal limits of variation of sexual emotion.

It may seem to some that the spirit in which we approached marriage was not that passionate and irresistible spirit of absolute acceptance which seems to them the ideal. Yet we both cherished ideals, and we seriously strove to mould our marriage as near to the ideal as our own natures and the circumstances permitted. It was certainly not a union of unrestrainable passion; I, though I failed yet clearly to realise why, was conscious of no inevitably passionate sexual attraction to her, and she, also without yet clearly realising why, had never felt genuinely passionate sexual attraction for any man. Such preliminary conditions may seem unfavourable in a romantic aspect. Yet in the end they proved, as so many conventionally unpromising conditions in my life have proved, I of inestimable value, and I can never be too thankful that I escaped a marriage of romantic illusions. Certainly, I was not a likely subject to fall victim to such a marriage.

The union was thus fundamentally at the outset, what later it became consciously, a union of affectionate comradeship, in which the specific emotions of sex had the smallest part, yet a union, as I was later to learn by experience, able to attain even on that basis a passionate intensity of love. It was scarcely so at the outset, although my letters to her in the early years are full of yearning love and tender solicitude. We were neither of us in our first youth. I was able to look on marriage as an experiment which might, or might not, turn out well. On her part it was, and remained to the end, a unique and profound experience which she never outgrew. Yet had anything happened to prevent the marriage it is not likely that either of us would then have suffered from a broken heart. The most passionate letters I wrote her were, as she realised, not written until some years after marriage. I can honestly say that by a gradual process of increased knowledge and accumulated emotional experience I am far more in love with her to-day than twenty-five years ago.

Yet to both of us our marriage seemed then a serious affair, and with the passing of the years it became even more tremendously serious. She, at heart distrustful of her own powers of attraction, would from time to time be assailed by doubts - though such doubts were in conflict with her more rooted convictions - that she was not my fit mate, that I realised this, and that it might be best if we separated in order to enable me to marry someone else. This was never at any moment my desire. Much as each of us suffered through marriage I have never been convinced that our marriage was a mistake. Even if in some respects it might seem a mistake, it has been my belief, deepened rather than diminished, that in the greatest matters of life we cannot safely withdraw from a mistake but are, rather, called upon to conquer it, and to retrieve that mistake in a yet greater development of life. It would be a sort of blasphemy against life to speak of a relationship which like ours aided great ends as a mistake, even if, after all, it should in a sense prove true that we both died of it at last.

What I felt, and feel, is that by just being your natural spontaneous self you are giving me so much more than I can hope to give you. You see, I am an extremely odd, reserved, slow undemonstrative person, whom it takes years and years to know. I have two or three very dear friends who date from 20 or 25 years back (and they like me better now than they did at first) and none of recent date. I'm not the least good for gobbling up rapidly - really don't repay the trouble! And I don't feel a bit anxious to be gobbled up, while the gobbler is already unwinding her scarf to wave to someone else! I fear this sounds very rude and horrid and not at all as it is meant.

That was the first and last time in our life together that any cloud arose from doubt on my part as to her love. I had not been in the faintest degree jealous of Claire, but, rightly or wrongly, as I have said, I had felt that Edith's love for Claire involved a diminished tenderness for me. If it was so my outburst had itself restored my position. I never repeated it, or felt the slightest impulse to repeat it. Thereafter Edith had a succession of intimate women friends, at least one of whom meant very much indeed to her. I never grudged the devotion, though it was sometimes great, which she expended on them, for I knew that it satisfied a deep and ineradicable need of her nature. The only test I applied to them was how far they were good for her. If they suited her - and her first intuitions were not always quite sound - I was not only content but glad. I never had a quarrel with one of them and some of them have been - now more than ever in our community of loss - my own dear friends. It must not, however, for a moment be supposed that these special friends with whom she had had for a time an intimate relationship such as one side of her nature craved were more than few in number. There was a succession of them but each relationship was exclusive while it lasted, which was usually for years, and would have been permanent had circumstances allowed. She was always relentlessly true to her ideals; she loathed promiscuity; she was attracted to purity of character, though by no means to puritanism; any touch of coarseness or of vice was fatal, and produced in her a revulsion of feeling which nipped in the bud one or two relationships.

I think we should agree, Dear Twin, on the subject of love. I think that passion is mostly a disastrous thing, and certainly ruinous to work for it makes all work seem of less than no account. And then, too, it's always felt for the wrong person. Indeed its very intensity seems due to a sort of vague realisation of the fact that there's nothing there! But I cannot say that I think that love is anything but good, and good for everything, including work. I mean by love something that is based on a true relationship and that has succeeded in avoiding the blind volcano of passion (or has contrived to pass safely through that stage). To secure the peaceful joyous and consoling and inspiring elements of love - and to escape the others - seems to me a very desirable & precious thing. Do you agree? As you say, the average man and woman usually only knows passion - and not or very often even that!

The idea that sexological categories were imposed on unwilling women by a hostile body of "experts" has also been challenged by recent research. Work on the biographical backgrounds of many leading sexologists has suggested a much closer interaction between individual figures and a homosexual or lesbian culture than was previously thought, so that it is difficult to argue that sexological notions of homosexual identity originated with sexologists and not with the homosexual men and women with whom they came into contact. The relationship between sexologist Havelock Ellis and his wife, Edith Lees Ellis, whom he included amongst his case studies of female inverts, has been one focus of discussion on this issue....

However, Liz Stanley has challenged this view, arguing that Havelock Ellis' account cannot be relied upon because of tensions within the marriage and that Edith Lees Ellis's own papers suggest that the category of inversion was not imposed on her unwillingly. In a letter to the sexologist Edward Carpenter, Edith Lees Ellis recounted a conservation she had had with Carpenter's sister, Alice, concerning Edith's sexuality, in which Alice had informed her that there was some debate amongst their acquaintances on the subject.

Edith apparently responded by including a statement on the subject of her own inversion in a public lecture she was giving that week, something which she also did during her 1914 lecture tour of America. Her willingness to discuss her sexuality in the public domain, in terms of inversion, suggests that Edith Lees Ellis was comfortable with this interpretation of her sexuality and, in a subsequent letter to Edward Carpenter, she discussed her feelings for a woman she had been overwhelmingly in love with. This evidence, Stanley argues, demonstrates not only that Edith Lees Ellis found the concept of inversion helpful in making sense of her feelings for other women, but also that she considered another sexologist, Edward Carpenter, himself a homosexual, a supportive friend and coefficient.

Ellis's wife, Edith Lees, seems to have been a victim of his theories. From his own account, Ellis apparently convinced her that she was a congenital invert, while she believed herself to be only a romantic friend to other women. He relates in My Life that during the first years of their marriage, she revealed to him an emotional relationship with an old friend who staved with her while she and Ellis were apart... He thus encouraged her to see herself as an invert and to regard her subsequent love relations with women as a manifestation of her inversion.

I am going to write to you a very difficult letter yet it must be written if I want to find peace of mind.

The truth Havelock Ellis is that I love you and that I must say so.

I shall try to set down facts as I have done for the dreams; it will be clearer to you and the most easy way for me...

So friend, let hear your advice. The thing I want above all is to retain your friendship, whatever cost, even if this means never seeing you again. If you think this the best course I shall do as you wish me to, but I must know before facing you again.

I had your letter this morning. It is very, very beautiful, & I am glad you wrote it, because it will help us to understand things & to have everything clear & right. I wanted to put my arms around you when you lay on the sofa half asleep, but I did not want to do anything you might misunderstand, & I should be sorry for you to do anything that you might feel afterwards was not right & that might make you unhappy. I would like to soothe you & comfort you & help you, & it is very good for me, too, to be near you, & I felt much better for your visit. I am sure we could be loving friends, real affectionate & intimate friends. But I wouldn't be any good as a passionate lover or husband. You must remember I am much older than you, & in some ways older than my years, as I have had a great deal to suffer & go through. I am not a bit like the virile robust men of the people in your dreams! I have several dear loving women friends, married & unmarried, (most of them just now scattered in various parts of the world, so that I cannot see them), & with some of them I am very close & intimate friends, so that we can be perfectly free & natural & like children together. But there is not one to whom I am a real lover. I don't ever want to be, & if they had a proper lover I should not feel that I had any right to be jealous. That is how I would like to be with you. I feel sure that I am good for you, & I am sure that you suit me. But as lover or a husband you would find me very disappointing. When you know me more you will feel that as an affectionate friend, as close as you like, someone whom you can be perfectly natural & yourself with, you will have all the best that I can give. It may be all the better for beginning just as it has begun, for that has happened with one or two friends who are very dear.

But there is nothing in all this to prevent you from being a good & faithful wife. I should be very sorry to do anything that was not fair to your husband, & I should be very sorry for you to have any sort of guilty thoughts. I would like you to feel that the love you have for me is not a love that you feel the least bit ashamed of, or that you have any need to be ashamed of. If you feel that this kind of affectionate friendship is not possible, then it would be best for us not to meet. But I think it is possible, & that you will find it quite easy & beautiful & natural & helpful. It would be all that to me too. I am, in some ways, understanding, as you say, but I am also like a child, & it is lovely to me to be able to be like a child.

Write very soon & tell me what you feel about it.

That was a lovely dream you had and I am glad you felt quiet and happy after it; that is how I would like to make you feel. Impressions and Comments is my favourite among my books because there is most of me in it. If you like the book, then you like the real me!

You had better destroy this letter, for it would be misunderstood if anyone saw it.

You are the first man who has ever made me feel ever so small. That is why I love you. I have been small in front of the woods, the sea, the moors & the plains, but seldom in front of a man. Men have sometimes been my equals, often I have felt them smaller. But you, you are like in my dream; you stand by me & dominate me, the pathetic little figure in green. Yet you have love & tenderness to give me & I love you.

It was a joy to have your letter this morning, Dear Friend, and to be able to feel quite assured that we understand each other, & on the day after you were here (before I received your beautiful letter which I am so thankful you wrote, & I just worship your lovely courage in doing it, & doing it so well) I felt very happy & was able to work much better than usual. But you must not be too enthusiastic about me before you know me well. It is better to begin with a small love that grows big than with a big love - that grows small! A propos of being small, there is no need for you to feel small, but I am glad you are small in size, for it is a funny thing that though I admire large women (& when I was quite young have fallen in love with them - at a distance) I have never been able to feel close and intimate friends except with small women. So that if you were a large woman I should have to say: "I am very sorry; I like & admire you very much, but I know we shall never be very dear friends - because you are so big!" I don't know why it is, because - in the abstract - I quite like big women ever so much better!

I have for a very long time been reconciled to the idea of her (Olive Schreiner) death for I knew for many years her health had been undermined and how much she suffered. I am sure she was quite reconciled herself, though still so full of vivid interest in life, that she went back to Africa to die... It is the end of a long chapter in my life & your Faun will soon be left alone by all the people who knew him early in life.

A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she may have had children by both husbands, and vet it may not be until she is past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full flowering of her whole nature...

She feels more mentally alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences of nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe, however they may explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her expression, a new force into all her activities.

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.