Hall, Radclyffe 1886–1943

(Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall)

PERSONAL: Born 1886, in Bournemouth, Hampshire, England; died of cancer October 7, 1943, in London, England; companion of Ladye Mabel Batten, 1908–16; companion of Una Troubridge, 1916–43. Education: Attended King's College, London; educated in Germany. Religion: Catholic.

CAREER: Writer. Society for Psychical Research, council member, 1916–24.

AWARDS, HONORS: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1927; Femina-Vie Heureuse prize, 1927, for Adam's Breed; Eichelbergher Humane Award Gold Medal, c. 1926.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

'Twixt Earth and Stars: Poems, John and Edward Bum-pus (London, England), 1906.

A Sheaf of Verses: Poems, John and Edward Bumpus (London, England), 1908.

Poems of the Past and Present, Chapman and Hall (London, England), 1910.

Songs of Three Counties, and Other Poems, Chapman and Hall (London, England), 1913.

The Forgotten Island, Chapman and Hall (London, England), 1915.

NOVELS

The Forge, Arrowsmith (London, England), 1924.

The Unlit Lamp, Cassell (London, England), 1924, reprinted with a new introduction by Zoe Fairbairns, Virago (London, England), 1981.

A Saturday Life, Arrowsmith, 1925, reprinted with a new introduction by Alison Hennegan, Penguin (New York, NY), 1989.

Adam's Breed, Cassell (London, England), 1926, reprinted with a new introduction by Alison Hennegan, Penguin (New York, NY), 1986.

The Well of Loneliness, J. Cape (London, England), 1928, reprinted with a new introduction by Alison Hennegan, Penguin (New York, NY), 1982, with a commentary by Havelock Ellis, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1990.

The Master of the House, J. Cape (London, England), 1932.

The Sixth Beatitude, Heinemann (London, England), 1936.

OTHER

Policeman of the Land: A Political Satire, Sophistocles Press, 1928.

Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (short stories), Heinemann (London, England), 1934.

Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, edited and with an introduction by Joanne Glasgow, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

SIDELIGHTS: Radclyffe Hall is perhaps best known for her 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, one of the first modern literary works whose plot concerned a same-sex relationship between women. Despite its laudatory critical reception, Hall's book was the subject of a ban under Britain's Obscene Libel Act, but late-twentieth-century scholars have since reappraised it as one of the premiere fictional portrayals of contemporary gay and lesbian life, a sensitive work that helped open doors of cultural acceptance for later writers.

Hall was born into a wealthy family in Hampshire, England, in 1886. Raised as a boy by her emotionally unstable parents, she was known as "John" to her friends and found security and support in her maternal grandmother, who encouraged the young girl's creative gifts. After receiving a large inheritance at the age of seventeen, Hall attended King's College in London and spent a year abroad in Germany. An accomplished amateur musician, she often wrote lyrics to accompany her compositions, and at the urging of her grandmother published some of this writing as a volume of verse titled 'Twixt Earth and Stars in 1906.

Following her book's publication, Hall became acquainted with Ladye Mabel Batten, a literary figure who subsequently became her companion and mentor. During the early years preceding World War I Hall produced several other volumes of poetry, including A Sheaf of Verses and Songs of Three Counties, and Other Poems, with have been considered noteworthy for their frank expressions of passion between women. In Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle, scholar Lovat Dickson wrote of the good influence Batten was on the shy Hall, encouraging her writing and remaining a steady companion. The critic noticed the improvement from Hall's debut to the publication of A Sheaf of Verses, remarking that "for the first time, with increasing confidence and power, the passion of those first years of their association is struck for all to hear." During this period Hall became a Catholic, like Batten, and her new faith grew to become an integral element in her subsequent works. Batten encouraged Hall to branch out into fiction, and the writer's first foray into this genre came with the 1924 publication of The Forge. By this time Hall was alone; Batten passed away in 1916, and the grieving Hall felt in part responsible, since she had developed a romantic interest in Batten's niece, Una Troubridge, prior to Batten's death.

The Unlit Lamp, Hall's second novel, also published in 1924, is seen by scholars as a thematic precursor to The Well of Loneliness. Much more subtle in its addressing of same-sex romance, the work's possibly scandalous subject matter was so restrained that it was hardly noted in contemporary reviews. The novel is the tale of a young Julia Ogden and her affection toward her tutor, Elizabeth Rodney. Ogden's increasing devotion to Rodney incenses her mother, and the conflict this presents in the Ogden family is the basis for the novel. The two younger women dream of leaving their small coastal town for London in order to pursue a university education, but the plans are continually waylaid due to financial considerations or the interference of the manipulative, emotionally needy Mrs. Ogden. Yet "the mother is no ogre," observed Stephen Brook in an essay on Hall for the Spectator, "which is why the portrait is so brilliant." Brook termed the novel "a powerful and detailed portrayal not just of Lesbian love, but of how the emotional needs of three flawed women are finally irreconcilable."

It had taken Hall two years to write The Unlit Lamp, and it took another two years before she found a publisher for it. "It is by the standards of the time a good first novel," wrote Dickson in Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness, "conveying with noticeable skill for a beginner subtleties in human relationships that could only have been observed by someone of acute sympathies."

Hall's next novel, Adam's Breed, follows a young man who is besieged by a collective guilt about the materialism of early twentieth-century society; it also reflects Hall's compassion for the welfare of animals. By this time Hall and Troubridge, the wife of a naval officer, had become involved in a long-term relationship. Troubridge, in her biography The Life of Radclyffe Hall, would write of her lover's compassion for animals and Hall's difficulty in accepting their often cruel treatment at the hands of humans, recalling that Hall "taught me to appreciate the rights of animals and conferred on me the painful privilege of the 'seeing eye,' until in the end I also could not fail to remark on the underfed or overloaded horse or ass, the chained and neglected dog, the untamed bird in the dirty, cruelly tiny cage." Gian-Luca, the protagonist of Adam's Breed is a young headwaiter of Italian descent who is sickened by the gorging he witnesses nightly among wealthy patrons of the restaurant; he is also acutely aware of the plight of animals he sees mistreated in everyday life. The pressure builds until Gian-Luca flees the city to live simply in the woods, but again becomes despondent when the pony he has befriended is captured for manual labor.

When Adam's Breed appeared in print, a New York Times Book Review contributor found both praiseworthy elements as well as some flaws, noting "the first part of the book moves along with a great deal of interest." However, the critic added, "the last part of the book degenerates into high-falutin' sentimentalism…. It seems predetermined and does not ring true."

Hall's landmark novel, The Well of Loneliness, appeared in print in 1928. The proclivities of its protagonist are explicit, and the passions depicted toward other female characters in the novel are also frank. Some details are autobiographical: the heroine's parents wished for a boy while the mother was expecting, and thus named the baby girl Stephen. As a young girl, Stephen develops a crush on one of the maids of the household, an incident which Dickson noted also took place in Hall's own youth. As a young girl, Stephen feels she is not like other young girls, and finds herself more drawn to masculine pursuits; like Hall, the protagonist is an accomplished equestrienne. As she enters young adulthood, she sees the folly of pursuing heterosexual relations, especially after a swain named Martin—with whom she feels only a brotherlike affinity—proclaims his love for her and she feels obligated to send him away. Stephen eventually becomes enmeshed in a quasi-relationship with a married woman in the small town in which they live; when Stephen's mother learns of the affair, she condemns her daughter harshly.

As The Well of Loneliness continues, Stephen enlists in a service corps for women when World War I breaks out and meets Mary, who is young, somewhat naive, and soon completely devoted to Stephen. The two return to Stephen's family estate, and their passion is not consummated quickly, "even though [Mary] makes no secret of her desire for it," wrote Dickson in Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness. "The strain on both of them is intense. Although the language in which this protracted restraint is presented is novelettish, the sense of strain is vividly conveyed, and the reader sees some of the handicaps of perversion," Dickson explained.

When Martin returns and falls in love with Mary, Stephen relinquishes her paramour unto him, knowing that Mary "cannot stand the social isolation of her life with Stephen" and "would have grown bitter at the judgments Stephen has the strength to rise above," Jane Rule pointed out in Lesbian Images. It is this self-sacrifice that may have been what Hall wished to convey, that sexual "inverts," while not concerned with reproducing themselves for posterity, may indeed be of a higher spiritual and moral nature than non-inverts. Secondarily, Hall may have also chosen to portray those whom nature had made inverts as objects of compassion, because societal mores might never allow them to lead happy, fulfilling—and prejudice-free—lives. In the end, Stephen beseeches God to "Give us also the right to our existence."

After its publication in 1928, The Well of Loneliness was publicly condemned and a trial soon followed. Hall lost the case and the novel was banned in England; in a similar case in a New York court the obscenity charges were dropped. Critical reaction to the novel was mixed, and was often tied in with a defense of it due to the controversy. Leonard Woolf, part of the influential British literary circle known as the Bloomsbury Group and husband to novelist Virginia Woolf, commented in the Nation and Athenaeum that Hall's novel "is written with understanding and frankness, with sympathy and feeling," but charged that as a work of literary merit, it falls short. Woolf termed The Well of Loneliness "formless and therefore chaotic…. It is emotionally that the book loses way, and a sign of this is Miss Hall's use of language. At the beginning the language is alive; the style is not brilliant or beautiful, but it is quick and vivid…. But as the book goes on, life and emotion die out of the language, and Miss Hall drops into journalese or the tell-tale novelist's cliches when she wants to heighten the emotion."

Novelist and literary critic Rebecca West, one of Hall's contemporaries, also found fault artistically with the author's use of language, remarking in a review for Bookman that the novelist seems to be inciting a feeling of sentimentalism in the reader. Such pandering to popular taste, West claimed, made it hard to defend The Well of Loneliness on purely artistic merit in the courts. Con-versely, in her book The School of Femininity: A Book for and about Women as They Are Interpreted through Feminine Writers of Yesterday and Today, Margaret Lawrence praised the author's "mystical sensitivity to tone. Her phrasing shows it. Her words are put down in relation to their sounds set against other sounds. She produces by this means a disturbing emotional effect." In the International Journal of Sexology, Clifford Allen also lauded The Well of Loneliness, granting that while its author "may have had faults in style … on no occasion did she indulge in dishonesty, never did she describe things falsely or cast a gloss over what was real. She never pretended that homosexuality led to other than unhappiness. It was her very honesty which led to her book's being banned."

Hall penned two other novels before ill health curtailed her writing in the years before her death. 1932's The Master of the House is the story of a man whose life paralleled that of Jesus Christ. Lawrence, writing in The School of Femininity, deemed this novel an appropriate companion to The Well of Loneliness. "While the heroine in the one book lives the life of a man within the body of a woman, the man in the other book lives the life of a Christ within the body of a mortal," Lawrence wrote. "Neither of them has any concern with normal experience. They should be kept together and read together. They are part of the same mysterious saga." Many elements of The Master of the House correspond to the life of Christ as presented in the Bible: Christophe is the son of a carpenter and his wife, Jouse and Marie; his cousin Jan, like John the Baptist, remains a confidant through adulthood. Hall set her updated version of the Biblical tale shortly before the outbreak of World War I, and the two men are sent to Palestine to defend that region against the Turkish army. There Christophe is ambushed, and his journey to death closely follows Christ's procession to the cross.

Dickson, writing in Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness, observed that Hall's attempt to retell the story of Christ in a modern atmosphere "diminishes the glory and the brightness that myth has attached to it…. One sees, looking at it from this distance, that the book in fact fails through over-earnestness, a mood antipathic to the time in the early thirties when it was published." L.A.G. Strong, critiquing the novel for the Spectator at the time of its publication, declared that while if divorced from the Biblical comparison the novel would hold up on its own, "by adding this weight of symbolism to it, [Hall] makes it totter dangerously."

Hall's seventh and final novel, The Sixth Beatitude, appeared in 1936. It is the story of a poor woman, Hannah Bullen, whose somewhat unconventional life—unmarried, she is mother to two—in a small English seaside town is marked by poverty and strife within her immediate family. The title of the work refers to the Roman Catholic notion of purity of mind and chastity of heart, and Hall attempts to portray the goodness of her protagonist despite the squalor of her surroundings. A contemporary reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted that "Hall certainly conveys, without any special pleading or attitudinizing, the native richness of speech and character that can exist in a row of old hovels in an old town, the warmth that somehow makes the dirt, cold and bickering bearable." Gwen Leys, critiquing The Sixth Beatitude for the New York Herald Tribune Books, noted that the author's characterizations of the peripheral figures of Bullen's life "give this story its bite, its fight and its character," yet concluded that "Hall is relentlessly determined to be grim."

Hall died of cancer in 1943. Although The Well of Loneliness is often cited as a pivotal work of twentieth-century lesbian fiction, the rest of her novels and poetry have often been overshadowed by the scandal that followed her best-known title—yet they also evince many of the same themes and convictions important to her. "The work of Radclyffe Hall … is serious, profound and beautiful work, in no way doctrinaire, yet thoroughly indoctrinated," wrote Lawrence in an essay published in The School of Femininity. "Her emotion is still yet deep. She is like a quiet pool of great depth. She is ageless…. She is preoccupied with the mysteries, as the priestesses were, and she pities the human race as it passes them by for things that can be added up and multiplied and subtracted and divided."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Baker, Michael, Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1985.

Castle, Terry, Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Cline, Sally, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John, Overlook Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Dickson, Lovat, Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle, Scribner (New York, NY), 1975.

Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Gay and Lesbian Literature, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1994.

Glasgow, Joanne, editor and author of introduction, Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Lawrence, Margaret, The School of Femininity: A Book for and about Women as They Are Interpreted through Feminine Writers of Yesterday and Today, Frederick A. Stokes (New York, NY), 1936.

O'Rourke, Rebecca, Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness, Routledge (New York, NY), 1989.

Rule, Jane, Lesbian Images, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1975.

Troubridge, Una, The Life of Radclyffe Hall, Citadel Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Volume 12, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, 3rd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Bookman, January, 1929.

Critical Survey, September, 2003, p. 23.

Herizons, Stacy Kauder, review of The Well of Loneliness, p. 40.

International Journal of Sexology, Volume 4, 1950.

Journal of Modern Literature, winter, 2003, p. 145.

Life and Letters, October, 1928, pp. 329-341.

Nation and Athenaeum, August 4, 1928, p. 593.

New Republic, September 18, 1929, pp. 132-133; November 25, 1985, p. 34.

New Statesman, September 13, 1968, pp. 321-322.

New York Herald Tribune Books, April 26, 1936, p. 10.

New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1926, pp. 9, 17.

Publishers Weekly, December 30, 1996, review of Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, p. 47.

Spectator, February 7, 1981, pp. 21-23.

Times Literary Supplement, April 18, 1936, p. 333.

Twentieth-Century Literature, winter, 1994, Adam Parkes, "Lesbianism, History, and Censorship," p. 434; fall, 2003, Laura Green "Hall of Mirrors: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Modernist Fictions of Identity," p. 277.