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.
1-2
Her literary reputation was based first on her poetry but later, and more substantially, on her novels, particularly Adam's Breed.
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.
13
She...
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had kept his Maurice unpublished.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
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...
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...
In it, she describes herself as an emancipated, rebellious, and Angry Young Woman.
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.
The final phrase in this description claims for herself membership of a largely male literary movement of the 1950s-60s, whose recognized members...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jackie Kay
Other poems in the collection explore the power of language as well as the limits of communication. The poem Sign (about sign language) stresses that They did not see / the way she talked /...
NJ
wrote a letter of appreciation to Radclyffe Hall
after The Well of Loneliness appeared in 1928. In January the following year she met Hall and Una Troubridge
when the former lectured in Southend (though...
Leisure and Society
Violet Hunt
VH
hosted luncheons for Radclyffe Hall
, Bram Stoker
, H. G. Wells
and others at the Writers' Club
in Bruton Street. She later claimed: It was the first really literary and journalistic women's...
Friends, Associates
Violet Hunt
VH
and Radclyffe Hall
began an extended, artistically-productive friendship.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
123-4
Intertextuality and Influence
Violet Hunt
VH
published The Doll, a novel about child custody which includes a character inspired in part by her fellow writer Radclyffe Hall
(at this date a poet but not a novelist).
