Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2

'IN LOVING MEMORY OF
SAMUEL OLDHAM LEES
OF CALDER BANK, DAVYHULME
DIED AT SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, DEC^R 8^TH 1879,

AGED 47 YEARS, WAS INTERRED HERE JAN^Y 3^RD 1880.'

Although Samuel Oldham Lees's grave is here, it's his daughter who is of interest. Edith Ellis (1861–1916), or Edith Lees, hated her cruel father and distrusted men in general. She became a lesbian. However, in 1883 she joined the Fellowship of the New Life, where she met Havelock Ellis, whom she later married. The marriage was unusual though: they probably never had sex, lived separately some of the time, and Edith continued with lesbian affairs.

 

In 1898 Edith published the novel Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll, which Jo-Ann Wallace suggests may have inspired D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover,* and which (published by 'Dr. Roland de Villiers') was accidentally suppressed at the same time as Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion (1897). There is a link below to Seaweed, along with links to other posts in the series.

 

* 'The Very First Lady Chatterley? Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s Seaweed', by Jo-Ann Wallace, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 Volume 51, Number 2, 2008.

 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Edwin Waugh: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #1

Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3
William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5
Edith Ellis's Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll (1898)