John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds was born in Bristol, England, in 1840. He was an English poet, an author of several works, and a literary critic. In 1873 he wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics, which discussed homosexuality between men. He printed ten copies in 1883, before effectively publishing the book in 1901. He was also known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as for his translations and biographies. He wrote Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1891), biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1878),...See more

John Addington Symonds was born in Bristol, England, in 1840. He was an English poet, an author of several works, and a literary critic. In 1873 he wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics, which discussed homosexuality between men. He printed ten copies in 1883, before effectively publishing the book in 1901. He was also known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as for his translations and biographies. He wrote Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1891), biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1878), Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Jonson (1886) and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and essays, and a translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887). John Addington Symonds died in Rome in 1893. In 1896, Havelock Ellis published, in German-prepared with the collaboration of Dr. Hans Kurella-Das kontr�re Geschlechtsgef�hl (Leipzig, by Georg H. Wigand's Verlag), later revised and published by Ellis as Sexual Inversion-the first medical text in English about homosexuality, which he had co-authored with Symonds, and which would become a part of Ellis's six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex. See less