Edmund Gosse - Personal Life

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 !"