Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe (1886–1943)

Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe (1886–1943), British writer. Radclyffe Hall, the name under which British literary figure Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall wrote, 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 scholars today consider it 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 entitled 'Twixt Earth and Stars in 1906.

Around this time Hall became acquainted with Ladye Mabel Batten, a literary figure who became her companion and mentor for several years to follow. In these 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, works noteworthy for their frank expressions of passion between women. During this period Hall had become a Catholic, like Batten, and her new faith was to become an integral element in her later works of fiction. Batten encouraged Hall to branch out into fiction, and the writer's first foray into this genre came with the 1924 publication ofThe Forge. However, Batten had passed away in 1916, and the grieving Hall felt in part responsible, since the writer had developed a romantic interest in Batten's niece, Una Troubridge.

The Unlit Lamp, Hall's second novel, was also published in 1924 and 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 little was mentioned of it in reviews.

Hall's 1926 novel, Adam's Breed, is the story of a young man besieged by a collective guilt about the excess consumption of modern society, and is a reflection of her compassion for the plight of animals. By this time Hall and Troubridge, the wife of a naval officer, had become involved in a long-term relationship. Hall had originally wished to title Adam's Breed "Food," but her publisher feared that it would be mistaken for a cookbook.

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. Hall herself was raised as a boy and went by the nickname John for much of her life. As a young girl, Stephen develops a crush on one of the maids of the household, an incident which the scholar Dickson noted had also taken place in Hall's own youth. As a young girl, Stephen feels that she is not like other young girls, and finds herself more drawn to masculine pursuits; like Hall, the protagonist is an accomplished equestrienne.

After its publication in 1928,The Well of Loneliness was publicly condemned by a writer for the Sunday Express and a trial soon followed. Hall lost the case and the novel was banned in England; in a later 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, commented in The Nation and The 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 fell short.

Hall penned two other novels before ill health curtailed her writing in the years before her death. In 1932, she published The Master of the House, the story of a man whose life paralleled that of Jesus Christ. The critic Lawrence, writing in The School of Femininity, deemed it 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, will remain a close 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 it against the Turkish army. There Christophe is ambushed and his journey to death closely follows Christ's procession to the cross.

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 (she is unmarried, but 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.

Hall died of cancer in 1943. Although The Well of Loneliness is often cited as seminal to modern gay and lesbian fiction, the rest of her novels and poetry have often been overshadowed by the scandal that is associated with her best-known title—yet they also evince many of the same themes and convictions important to her.