Ada Esther Leverson

Born: 10 October 1862.

Died: 30 August 1933.

Ada Ester Leverson was an English novelist who belonged to London's world of wealth and fashion. Her six novels were published between 1907 and 1916 and they belong to Edwardian era.

She married early, becoming Mrs. Ernest Leverson. She had a son who died when a small boy. Her one daughter, Violet, married Guy Windham and has written a biography of her mother, The Sphinx and Her Circle.

She was a friend of the artists and writers of her time from Oscar Wilde to the Sitwells. It was Wilde who gave her the nickname "Sphinx". This is the title of one of Oscar Wilde's poems, "The Sphinx", that Ada parodied. From then on Oscar always called her "Sphinx", and the name stuck.

Before Aleister Crowley's divorce from his first wife Rose Kelly, he entered into a romantic and sexual affair with Ada. "Too marry at Hastings would be to repent at St. Leonard's," she often joked, and Crowley had to agree with another of Oscar Wildes' characterizations: she was the wittiest person he had ever met. Reviewing her works, Crowley called her "easily the daintiest and wittiest of our younger feminine writers." This affair was brief and neither left much record of the affair; it appears to have been a brief and convenient tryst for them both. In February 1908, Crowley was reunited with his wife as she had recovered from her alcoholism, however the recovery was temporary as Rose experienced a relapse.

In her later years, Ada spent time abroad, particularly in Italy, where she passed the time in the company of the Sitwells. By this time, she had grown distressingly deaf. In 1935 while returning to London from Florence, she was struck down by illness. She died in 1936 at the age of 71.