Volume 4, Number 5 · April 8, 1965
A Hidden Life
By Francis Haskell
John Addington Symonds: A Biography
by Phyllis Grosskurth
Holt Rinehart & Winston, 400 pp., $6.95
John Addington Symonds was a distinguished—even an important—writer who was also a homosexual. Mrs. Grosskurth has written a most excellent, sensitive and humane biography of a homosexual who also wrote books. To justify such an emphasis she can call on much influential support: on Symonds himself, perhaps, who seems to have thought that his (still unpublished) Memoirs were his most significant contribution to literature, and certainly on those many recent reviewers of her biography in the London press who have treated his writings with patronage or contempt. Though she herself clearly respects his achievement, Mrs. Grosskurth talks of Symonds 'having long since slipped into semi-oblivion,' and it would be ironical if the undoubtedly fascinating picture she skillfully gives us of his hidden life should distract attention still further from what surely remains his most valuable legacy to the world: his books.
Review, 1775 words
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