The Passions of John Addington Symonds

Abstract

This book offers a critical survey of the writing of John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840–Rome 1893), one of Victorian Britain’s most prolific authors and a major figure in queer history and thought. Works examined include An Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872), Studies of the Greek Poets (1873–6), The Renaissance in Italy (1875–86), Animi Figura (1882), Vagabunduli Libellus (1884), Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1893), In the Key of Blue (1893), and Sexual Inversion (written with Havelock Ellis, published posthumously in 1897), as well as the privately printed essays A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), the latter of which contains the first appearance in English print of the word “homosexual,” a recent coinage of German sexology. Symonds’s Memoirs, the first complete edition of which appeared in 2016, are the principal subject of two chapters and play a prominent role in most of the others. Also explored are Symonds’s relationships to predecessors like Winckelmann, Byron, and Hegel; contemporaries like Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Pater, and Henry James; and successors like Sigmund Freud. Close reading across Symonds’s varied oeuvre reveals the entanglement of sexual desire and self-understanding in a range of seemingly unrelated objects of attention, such as color. This book also tracks Symonds’s enduring engagement with the art and literature of classical antiquity. The result is a portrait of a remarkably complex thinker, with a bold vision of the queerness of the world itself.