Edith Ellis, Sapphic Idealism, and The Lover’s Calendar (1912)

Abstract

Suzanne Raitt’s 1998 article on “Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology” makes several important interventions in recent discussions about the ways in which English sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and sexual utopians such as Edward Carpenter represented homosexuality at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 3 Among Raitt’s significant contributions are, first, to emphasize the centrality of a discourse of love in turn-of-the-century sexology; second, to trace its continuing effects in lesbian self-understanding and writing of the 1920s; and, third, to note how Freud’s somewhat later work, like that of Otto Weininger, “pathologized” the experience of love. To probe the effects of these developments, Raitt examines the ways in which Vita Sackville-West uses her 1920 autobiography, unpublished in her lifetime, to try to understand the guilt and shame she feels as a consequence of her “perversion.” As Raitt points out, “The ‘perversion’ she describes is a moral, emotional and sexual dereliction,” one that Vita Sackville-West ascribes to weakness and self-indulgence. 4 The contents of the autobiography, together with the elaborate and unnecessary lengths she went to in order to hide the manuscript, point to a pronounced and “symptomatic performance of her own shame.” 5 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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