Havelock Ellis Collection - The New Spirit (Annotated)

Diderot, Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoi

By: Havelock Ellis

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This is a new edition of “The New Spirit,” originally published in 1892 by Walter Scott, Ltd., of London. Part of Adeptio’s “The Best of Havelock Ellis Collection,” from the “Unforgettable Classic Series,” this is not a facsimile reprint. Obvious typographical errors have been carefully corrected and the entire text has been reset and redesigned by Adeptio Editions to enhance readability, while respecting the original edition. The eBook edition was designed in an elegant style and set to take full advantage of the readers’ features. “The New Spirit” was Havelock Ellis' first book, a collection of literary essays on Diderot, Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoi, originally published in 1890. The book explores “the new spirit” that has come into the world. Showing deep understanding of his times, Ellis discusses the sciences of anthropology, sociology, and political science; the increasing importance of women—which he believed to be the most significant movement of his time—the approaching disappearance of war, and art and religion as a means to seek rest. This is the original third edition. “The New Spirit” is considered one of Havelock's masterpieces and helped establish Havelock's reputation throughout the world. About the Author: Havelock Ellis was a social activist, a physician and a psychologist, whose best-known works concern sexuality and criminology. Among his over forty books, in 1890 he published “The Criminal,” a remarkable work on criminal anthropology. In the same year, he published “The New Spirit,” a collection of literary essays on Diderot, Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoy, and Ellis’s attempt to synthesize science and religious mysticism. In 1898 he wrote “Affirmations,” which contains essays on Nietzsche, Casanova, Zola, Huysmans, and St. Francis. In 1897, he published “Sexual Inversion,” the first medical text in English about homosexuality, which he had co-authored with John Addington Symonds in an earlier edition, and which became a part of Ellis’s six-volume “Studies in the Psychology of Sex.” In 1922, he published “Little Essays of Love and Virtue,” which aimed primarily at young people, youths and girls at the period of adolescence, who were in the author’s thoughts in all the studies he wrote of sex because he was of that age when he first vaguely planned them. These titles are part of our “Unforgettable Classic Series: The Best of Havelock Ellis Collection.” Born in Surrey, England, in 1859, Havelock Ellis was considered by the overwhelming majority of critics as the best translator of “Germinal,” Émile Zola`s masterpiece. Ellis was associated with the Decadent movement and with the “Lutetian Society,” a secret literary society, through which authors and translators like himself were able to provide British readers with translations of works which were often antagonistic to the Victorian ideals of morality—such as some of Émile Zola’s controversial novels—aiming at expanding the cultural horizons of the few lucky readers who had access to them. Havelock Ellis died in Suffolk, England, in 1939.