Personal Life
There he met Janet Catherine North (sister of botanical artist Marianne North, 1830-1890). They married at Hastings on 10 November 1864. They settled in London and had four daughters: Janet (born 1865), Charlotte (born 1867), Margaret (born 1869) and Katharine (born 1875). (She was later honored for her writing as Dame Katharine Furse.)
While in Clifton in 1868, Symonds met and fell in love with Norman Moor, a youth about to go up to Oxford, who became his pupil. Symonds and Moor had a four year affair but did not have sex. According to Symonds' diary of 28 January 1870, "I stripped him naked and fed sight, touch and mouth on these things." The relationship occupied a good part of his time. (On one occasion he left his family and travelled to Italy and Switzerland with Moor.) It also inspired his most productive period of writing poetry, published in 1880 as New and Old: A Volume of Verse.
Read more about this topic: John Addington Symonds
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“It is cowardly to fly from natural duties and take up those that suit our taste or temperament better; but it is also unwise to take an exaggerated view of personal duties, which shuts out the proper care of the mind and body entrusted to us.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)