Askesis as Aesthetic Home: Edward Perry Warren, Lewes House, and the Ideal of Greek Love

ABSTRACT

This article explores the queer writings of Boston-born Edward Perry warren (1860–1928) and the spaces of his Lewes House, East Sussex, that formed the basis of his Uranian ideal. warren, along with his personal secretary (aka lover), John Marshall, amassed an impressive collection of mainly antiquities, most of which helped to form the Boston Museum of Fine Art. At Lewes House warren conceived a community of younger, liked-minded men, many of whom benefited directly from his financial generosity and guidance. For the owner of the house education and intellectual pursuits were the guiding principles behind what was ultimately an ancient-Greek inspired homosocial community. Lewes House was austere and coded as a space for both his much celebrated collection and community, each being an extension of the other. In his three-volume The Defence of Uranian Love (1928), written under the pseudonym of Arthur Lyon Raile, warren falls within a specific literary tradition of queer authors at the end of the nineteenth century who turned back to ancient Greece as a preferred exemplary society in which an older male figure took a younger male under his tutelage and protection, guiding him to his adult life. An important missing component of the Greek ideal that men like warren espoused and wrote about was the space in which this ideal could be performed, worked through, and aestheticized.

KEYWORDS:

• Greek ideal
• homosexuality
• Oxford
• Lewes House
• collecting