Introduction

The Victorian poet, historian and man of letters, John Addington Symonds, began writing his Memoirs in March 1889. The resulting text provides a fascinating account of his experience as a homosexual man living subject to the moral and legal constraints of nineteenth-century society. The present edition is the first to reproduce all the manuscript’s surviving materials, allowing its wonderfully detailed, diverse and digressive narrative to stand. This Introduction recounts the history of the manuscript: the difficulties, idiosyncrasies and contingencies that marked its composition and compilation, and the obstacles to reading that have characterised its legacy and afterlife (bound up with the actions of relatives and executors, biographers and editors, libraries and publishers).