John Addington Symonds
His father, the physician John Addington Symonds (1807–1871), was the author of Criminal Responsibility (1869), The Principles of Beauty (1857) and Sleep and Dreams.
The younger Symonds, considered delicate, did not take part in games at Harrow School after the age of 14, and he showed no particular promise as a scholar.
[2] Symonds moved to Clifton Hill House at the age of ten, an event which he believed had a large and beneficial impact towards his health and spiritual development.
He did not mention the incident for more than a year until in 1859, when a student at Oxford University, he told the story to John Conington, the Latin professor.
Earlier, he had given Symonds a copy of Ionica, a collection of homoerotic verse by William Johnson Cory, the influential Eton College master and advocate of pederastic pedagogy.
While in Clifton in 1868, Symonds met and fell in love with Norman Moor (10 January 1851 – 6 March 1895), a youth about to go up to Oxford, who became his pupil.
"[7] The relationship occupied a good part of his time, including one occasion he left his family and travelled to Italy and Switzerland with Moor.
Since his prize essay on the Renaissance at Oxford, Symonds had wanted to study it further and emphasise the reawakening of art and literature in Europe.
There he wrote most of his books: biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1878), Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Jonson (1886) and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and essays, and a translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887).
[2] Symonds left his papers and his autobiography in the hands of Brown, who wrote an expurgated biography in 1895, which Edmund Gosse further stripped of homoerotic content before publication.
Rich in description, full of "purple patches", his work lacks the harmony and unity essential to the conduct of philosophical argument.
[11] The work, "perhaps the most exhaustive eulogy of Greek love,"[12] remained unpublished for a decade, and then was printed at first only in a limited edition for private distribution.
[14] Aware of the taboo nature of his subject matter, Symonds referred obliquely to pederasty as "that unmentionable custom" in a letter to a prospective reader of the book,[15] but defined "Greek love" in the essay itself as "a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness.
[17] While the taboos of Victorian England prevented Symonds from speaking openly about homosexuality, his works published for a general audience contained strong implications and some of the first direct references to male-male sexual love in English literature.
The same year, his translations of Michelangelo's sonnets to the painter's beloved Tommaso Cavalieri restore the male pronouns which had been made female by previous editors.
Symonds's daughter, Madge Vaughan, was probably writer Virginia Woolf's first same-sex crush,[citation needed] though there is no evidence that the feeling was mutual.
Henry James used some details of Symonds's life, especially the relationship between him and his wife, as the starting-point for the short story "The Author of Beltraffio" (1884).
