Havelock Ellis papers

The collection consists of correspondence and manuscripts of Havelock Ellis. Ellis, 1859-1939 began his career in the medical profession but soon gave up general practice for literary and scientific work. The more popular researches of the Freudian school have to a considerable extent overshadowed the methods of Ellis, in which more emphasis is laid on biology and less on clinical experience.

There is very little of Ellis' own correspondence in. the collection: the greatest part of the correspondence consists of letters to Ellis. The more interesting correspondents include Thomas Hardy, William James, Leo Tolstoy, Amy Lowell, Rockwell Kent, Bertrand Russell . Herbert Spencer, Upton Sinclair, Rebecca West and Sigmund Freud. Much of the correspondence consists of editorial matters and complimentary notes. Of greatest interest are the Freud letters. The collection will be of interest to the scholar interested in Ellis and in his relationship to Freud.

The bulk of the collection is composed of manuscripts by Ellis. Among them is a work entitled My Confessional made up of seventy short pieces. Each is based upon a problem posed to Ellis by one of his correspondents so that the author's opinion on a great number of topics is presented. Other manuscripts include: Sex in Contemporary Life, Marcel Jouhandeau, Intro. to James Hinton's Life In Nature (NY 1934), concerning Jude the Obscure, The Problem of Sexual Potency, William Morris.

There is also a manuscript, by Sir T. Percy Nunn entitled "Edudation as a Biological Experiment."