Volume 27, Number 18 · November 20, 1980
The Sage of Sex
By Noel Annan
Havelock Ellis: A Biography
by Phyllis Grosskurth
Knopf, 492 pp., $16.95
Eminent Edwardians
by Piers Brendon
Houghton Mifflin, 288 pp., $10.95
'I thought you were going to capture the essential Havelock,' wrote a disappointed admirer to Phyllis Grosskurth, who had shown her a chapter of this biography in draft. But even after she had read well over twenty thousand letters in the archives belonging to Havelock Ellis's adopted son, hundreds more in four other private collections and in fifty-one libraries, together with the fifty odd volumes, two hundred articles and reviews, and thirty-five introductions and editions which he wrote, le sage de Brixton remained as elusive as the South London borough where he lived is featureless.
Review, 5094 words
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