Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall | |
|---|---|
 Radclyffe Hall, c. 1930 | |
| Born | (1880-08-12)12 August 1880 Durley Road, Bournemouth, Hampshire, England, UK |
| Died | 7 October 1943(1943-10-07) (aged 63) London, England, UK |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet, short story writer |
| Period | 1906–1936 |
| Signature |  |
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall (12 August 1880 – 7 October 1943) was an English poet and author. She is best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature.
Contents
1 Life
2 Later years and death
3 Novels
3.1 The Well of Loneliness
3.2 Later novels
4 The Girls of Radcliff Hall
5 Works
5.1 Novels
5.2 Poetry
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
Life
Sunny Lawn, Bournemouth, Dorset
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born in 1880 at "Sunny Lawn", Durley Road, Bournemouth, Hampshire (now Dorset),[1] to a wealthy philandering father, Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, and an unstable mother, Mary Jane Diehl.[2] Her stepfather was the professor of singing Albert Visetti, whom she did not like and who had a tempestuous relationship with her mother.[3][4] Hall was a lesbian[5] and described herself as a "congenital invert", a term taken from the writings of Havelock Ellis and other turn-of-the-century sexologists. Having reached adulthood without a vocation, she spent much of her twenties pursuing women she eventually lost to marriage.
Mabel Batten sang to John Singer Sargent as he painted her portrait, around 1897
In 1907 at the Bad Homburg spa in Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten, a well-known amateur singer of lieder. Batten (nicknamed "Ladye") was 51 to Hall's 27, and was married with an adult daughter and grandchildren. They fell in love, and after Batten's husband died they set up residence together. Batten gave Hall the nickname John, which she used the rest of her life.[6]
In 1915 Hall fell in love with Mabel Batten's cousin Una Troubridge (1887–1963), a sculptor who was the wife of Vice-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, and the mother of a young daughter. When Batten died in 1916, Hall had Batten's corpse embalmed and a silver crucifix blessed by the pope laid on it.[7] Hall, Batten and Troubridge were "undeterred by the Church's admonitions on same-sex relationships. Hall's Catholicism sat beside a life-long attachment to spiritualism and reincarnation."[8] In 1917, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge began living together.[9] From 1924 to 1929 they lived at 37 Holland Street, Kensington, London.[10]
The relationship would last until Hall's death. In 1934 Hall fell in love with Russian émigrée Evguenia Souline and embarked upon a long-term affair with her, which Troubridge painfully tolerated.[11] Hall became involved in affairs with other women throughout the years.[12][13]
Later years and death
Radclyffe Hall, right, and Una, Lady Troubridge with their dachshunds at Crufts dog show, February 1923
Hall lived with Troubridge in London and, during the 1930s, in the tiny town of Rye, East Sussex, noted for its many writers, including her contemporary the novelist E. F. Benson. Hall died at age 63 of colon cancer, and is interred at Highgate Cemetery in North London at the entrance of the chamber of the Batten family, where Mabel is buried as well.
In 1930, Hall received the Gold Medal of the Eichelbergher Humane Award. She was a member of the PEN club, the Council of the Society for Psychical Research and a fellow of the Zoological Society.[14] Radclyffe Hall was listed at number sixteen in the top 500 lesbian and gay heroes in The Pink Paper.[15]
Novels
Hall's first novel was The Unlit Lamp, the story of Joan Ogden, a young girl who dreams of setting up a flat in London with her friend Elizabeth (a so-called Boston marriage) and studying to become a doctor, but feels trapped by her manipulative mother's emotional dependence on her. Its length and grimness made it a difficult book to sell, so she deliberately chose a lighter theme for her next novel, a social comedy entitled The Forge.[16] While she had used her full name for her early poetry collections, she shortened it to M. Radclyffe Hall for The Forge. The book was a modest success, making the bestseller list of John O'London's Weekly.[17]The Unlit Lamp, which followed it into print, was the first of her books to give the author's name simply as Radclyffe Hall.[18]
There followed another comic novel, A Saturday Life (1925), and then Adam's Breed (1926), a novel about an Italian headwaiter who, becoming disgusted with his job and even with food itself, gives away his belongings and lives as a hermit in the forest. The book's mystical themes have been compared to Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.[19] It sold well, was critically acclaimed, and won both the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize, a feat previously achieved only by E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.[20]
The Well of Loneliness
Hall's best-known work was The Well of Loneliness, the only one of her eight novels to have overt lesbian themes. Published in 1928, The Well of Loneliness deals with the life of Stephen Gordon, a masculine lesbian who, like Hall herself, identifies as an "invert".
Although The Well of Loneliness is not sexually explicit, it was nevertheless the subject of an obscenity trial in the UK, which resulted in all copies of the novel being ordered destroyed. The United States allowed its publication only after a long court battle. It is currently published in the UK by Virago, and by Anchor Press in the United States. The Well of Loneliness was number seven on a list of the top 100 lesbian and gay novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999.[21]
Later novels
An anonymous verse lampoon entitled The Sink of Solitude appeared during the controversy over The Well. Although its primary targets were James Douglas, who had called for The Well's suppression, and the Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, who had started legal proceedings, it also mocked Hall and her book. One of the illustrations, which depicted Hall nailed to a cross, so horrified her that she could barely speak of it for years afterward. Her sense of guilt at being depicted in a drawing that she saw as blasphemous led to her choice of a religious subject for her next novel, The Master of the House.[22]
At Hall's insistence, The Master of the House was published with no cover blurb, which may have misled some purchasers into thinking it was another novel about "inversion". Advance sales were strong, and the book made No. 1 on The Observer's bestseller list, but it received poor reviews in several key periodicals, and sales soon dropped off.[23] In the United States reviewers treated the book more kindly, but shortly after the book's publication, all copies were seized—not by the police, but by creditors. Hall's American publisher had gone bankrupt. Houghton Mifflin took over the rights, but by the time the book could be republished, its sales momentum was lost.[24]
The Girls of Radcliff Hall
British composer and bon vivant Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners, wrote a roman à clef girls' school story entitled The Girls of Radcliff Hall, in which he depicts himself and his circle of friends, including Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as lesbian schoolgirls at a school named "Radcliff Hall". The novel was written under the pseudonym "Adela Quebec" and published and distributed privately; the indiscretions to which it alluded created an uproar among Berners's intimates and acquaintances, making the whole affair highly discussed in the 1930s. Cecil Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed.[25][26][27] The novel subsequently disappeared from circulation, making it extremely rare. The story is, however, included in Berners' Collected Tales and Fantasies.
Works
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References
^ Baker p. 7
^ Vargo, Marc E. "Scandal: Infamous Gay Controversies of the Twentieth Century" pp. 56-57
^ Laura Seddon, British Women Composers and Instrumental Chamber Music in the Early Twentieth Century, Routledge (2013) - Google Books p158
^ Radclyffe Hall Biography - Your Dictionary
^ Glagow, Joanne (2002). "Hall, Radclyffe". GLBTQ. Retrieved 5 November 2007..mw-parser-output cite.citationfont-style:inherit.mw-parser-output qquotes:"""""""'""'".mw-parser-output code.cs1-codecolor:inherit;background:inherit;border:inherit;padding:inherit.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-free abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Lock-green.svg/9px-Lock-green.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-registration abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-gray-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-subscription abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-red-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registrationcolor:#555.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration spanborder-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-errordisplay:none;font-size:100%.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-errorfont-size:100%.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-formatfont-size:95%.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-leftpadding-left:0.2em.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-rightpadding-right:0.2em
^ Cline, pp 58–67.
^ Terry Philpot, "In and out of church," THE TABLET, 21 July, 2018, 8-9.
^ Ibid., 9.
^ "Radclyffe Hall". A purnell. Archived from the original on 9 May 2006.
^ [File:Radclyffe Hall 37 Holland Street blue plaque.jpg "English Heritage Blue Plaque"]
^ Hall's letters to Souline were published in Glasgow, Joanne, ed. (1997). Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-3125-2.
^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 21 March 2006. Retrieved 21 April 2006.CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link)
^ Philpot, 9.
^ Biographical note in the Virago Press edition of The Well of Loneliness.
^ The Pink Paper, 26 September 1997 edition, issue #500
^ Baker, pp 152–156.
^ Baker, 164.
^ Baker, p 168.
^ Baker, 183–186.
^ Baker, pp 196–197.
^ "The Publishing Triangle's list of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels".
^ Baker, p. 257; Cline, p. 280.
^ Baker, pp. 275–276.
^ Baker, pp. 279–280.
^ Florence Tamagne, "History Of Homosexuality In Europe, 1919–1939", Algora Publishing, 2004;
ISBN 0-87586-356-6, p 124
^ Bryony Jones, The music of Lord Berners (1883–1950): the versatile peer, Ashgate Publishing, 2003;
ISBN 0-7546-0852-2, pp 9, 101, 143
^ Beverly Lyon Clark, Regendering the school story: sassy sissies and tattling tomboys, Routledge, 2001;
ISBN 0-415-92891-5, p 143
Further reading
Una Troubridge (1961): The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond). 2008, Hesperides Press:
ISBN 978-1443725422
Lovat Dickson (1975): Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle (HarperCollins).
ISBN 978-0002112352- Michael J.N. Baker (1985): Our Three Selves. The Life of Radclyffe Hall (New York: William Morrow).
ISBN 978-0688043858 - Sally Cline (1999): Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (Overlook Press).
ISBN 978-0879518318 - Diana Souhami (1998): The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
ISBN 978-0297818250
External links
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to Radclyffe Hall. |
Works by or about Radclyffe Hall at Internet Archive
Works by Marguerite Radclyffe Hall at Faded Page (Canada)
Works by Radclyffe Hall at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Smith, David. "Lesbian novel was 'danger to nation'". The Observer. London. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
Radclyffe Hall The Knitting Circle: Literature[permanent dead link]
Radclyffe Hall profile, Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture
Radclyffe Hall Collection, Photographs at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge: papers and research material series, collectionscanada.gc.ca; accessed 9 April 2014.
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