Personal Life
Gosse married Ellen Epps (23 March 1850–29 August 1929), a young painter in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, who was the daughter of George Napoleon Epps, one of the Epps family of homeopaths. Though she was initially determined to pursue her art, she succumbed to his determined courting and they married in August 1875, with a reception at the house of Lawrence Alma-Tadema whose pupil she had been, visiting his parents, who did not attend the registry office wedding, at the end of their honeymoon in Devon and Cornwall. She continued to paint and wrote stories and reviews for various publications. In 1907, she inherited a sizeable fortune from her uncle, James Epps, the cocoa manufacturer.
Theirs was a happy marriage lasting more than 50 years and they had three children, Emily Teresa (b. 1877), Phillip Henry George (1879–1959) and Laura Sylvia, who became a well-known painter. Philip Gosse became a physician, but is best known as the author of The Pirates' Who's Who (1924).
Gosse was actually a homosexual. Only after fifteen years of friendship, in 1890, did Gosse admit to J.A. Symonds, around the time the latter was working on A Problem in Greek Ethics, that indeed he was gay, thus confirming the suspicions Symonds had voiced earlier. "Years ago I wanted to write to you about all this", Gosse wrote to Symonds, "and withdrew through cowardice. I have had a very fortunate life, but there has been this obstinate twist in it !"
Read more about this topic: Edmund Gosse
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“All that a pacifist can undertake—but it is a very great deal—is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.”
—Vera Brittain (1896–1970)