Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Radclyffe Hall
-
Standard Name: Hall, Radclyffe
Birth Name: Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall
Nickname: John
Self-constructed Name: Radclyffe Hall
RH
is best-known today for her landmark lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, 1928. But she herself explained that she waited until she had made a name for myself as an author . . . because I felt that it would . . . be difficult for an unknown writer to get a novel on congenital sexual inversion published.
Hall, Radclyffe. Radclyffe Hall’s 1934 Letter About The Well of Loneliness. Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, 1994.
1-2
Her literary reputation was based first on her poetry but later, and more substantially, on her novels, particularly Adam's Breed.
In it, she describes herself as an emancipated, rebellious, and Angry Young Woman.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
The final phrase in this description claims for herself membership of a largely male literary movement of the 1950s-60s, whose recognized members...
Textual Features
Naomi Mitchison
Her format here has stories or groups of stories introduced and ended with a poem. Topics range from ancient to contemporary, from sexuality to politics. The first poem has Phaedra
telling her sister Ariadne
about...
Publishing
Naomi Mitchison
She had finished this book, and her publisher had read it by 1933. She argued for months over its acceptability with her usual publishers, Jonathan Cape
(who had been fined for publishing Radclyffe Hall
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Gwen Moffat
This book describes life in the women's army
and GM
's early, rackety non-army experiences, like milking cows and steering a sailing ship as the only sober member of the crew. Most vivid of all...
names
Mary Renault
BirthName: Eileen Mary Challans
Nickname: Molly
MR
was known as Molly in her childhood, because her mother Clementine was often called Mary in the family. It took a long time for her to achieve being...
politics
Mary Renault
MR
appreciated Compton Mackenzie
's Extraordinary Women, which dealt openly with lesbians and evaded the censor because it treated lesbianism as comic. She referred to it in a review as a masterpiece of gentle...
Textual Features
Mary Renault
Lesbianism had been the subject of novels in the 1920s and 30s. Virginia Woolf
's Mrs. Dalloway and Elizabeth Bowen
's The Hotel had both been criticised (the latter severely) for sympathetic treatments of emotional...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Renault
Homosexuals in British fiction had been portrayed mostly as sick, funny, or both since the Oscar Wilde
trials (1895). E. M. Forster
had kept his Maurice unpublished. Radclyffe Hall
had run into trouble. Virginia Woolf
Education
Bernice Rubens
Bernice attended first Tredegarville Infant School, then Roath Park Girls' School. She and her siblings would sometimes steal chocolate from Woolworths
(never from a corner shop where they would have known the shopkeeper).
Rubens, Bernice. When I Grow Up. Time Warner Books, 2005.
13
She...
politics
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
disliked the term feminist, though many of her socially nonconforming attitudes would attract that term today. She supported the fight for Radclyffe Hall
's Well of Loneliness. She did not involve herself...
Textual Production
Stevie Smith
SS
's list of requisites for a critic or reviewer goes like this: Attention, impartiality, and no regard for age or sex.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
173
In April 1941 she was reviewing for John O'London's, Country Life...
Friends, Associates
Christopher St John
CSJ
, Edith Craig
, and Tony Atwood
spent much time in the company of Radclyffe Hall
and Una Troubridge
, who were staying temporarily in Kent while their house was being renovated.
One of her close friends and literary mentors was Daphne Ionides
, whom she met in 1926.
Huse, Nancy. Noel Streatfeild. Twayne, 1994.
xv
Huse suggests that this was (in addition to a stimulating literary and professional friendship) an intense relationship...
Textual Production
Violet Trefusis
Around 1941, VT
and Vita discussed another writing of their story. Vita thought that a novel superior to Radclyffe Hall
's loathsomeWell of Loneliness could be produced, but soon dismissed the idea of a...
Occupation
Una Troubridge
By the age of sixteen, UT
had begun receiving commissions for her sculptures and had rented a studio of her own in which to exhibit her works. The money she earned from these commissions gave...
