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Radclyffe Hall
(1880 - 1943)
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John : The Love Letters of Radcliff Hall by Joanne
Glasgow (Editor)
In 1934, after 20 years
of a mostly monogamous relationship with Una Troubridge, Radclyffe
Hall, author of the notorious lesbian classic The
Well of Loneliness, fell in love with someone else.
Evguenia Souline, a poor, friendless, Russian exile living in
Europe, had 30 years to Hall's 54. To Hall, Souline was the
picture of a virgin maiden in distress. Hall's obsessive
relationship with Souline, Joanne Glasgow argues in her
introduction, precipitated the author's creative and physical
decline. These letters to Souline, written between 1934 and 1942,
the year Hall died, contain Hall's ideas about the origins of
homosexuality, the obligations of marriage and passion, political
opinions, and ideas about art. Perhaps most poignantly, they are
records of the daily, sometimes hourly, fluctuations of a nervous
lover's anxieties and desires. The Radclyffe Hall of these letters
is a flawed, vulnerable, utterly human woman who passes through
romantic obsession to avuncular concern for a young charge she met
late in life. (Amazon.com)
 The
Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami
The wealthy,
conservative lesbian Radclyffe Hall is remembered now for a single
brave act: the publication of her troubling classic The
Well of Loneliness (1928), the first novel in English on
the theme of "sexual inversion." It appeared the same
year as Virginia Woolf's jeu d'esprit Orlando, which is
more or less about Woolf's love of Vita Sackville-West, but the
authorities failed to decipher the subversive undertone of Woolf's
modernist prose--and it was Hall's blandly realistic novel that
was seized and banned. The best yet of Diana Souhami's
biographies, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall is an absorbing
and irreverent account of Hall's life and work, with emphasis on
the stormy reception of The Well of Loneliness and Hall's
long relationship with the artist Una Troubridge, "a
formidable acolyte, an indispensable servant, even if there was
the grip of tentacles about her and the clink of chains." --Regina
Marler, Amazon.com
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From
Excerpt: The Knitting Circle
In 1915 Radclyffe Hall fell in love with Mabel
Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge
(1887-1963), a sculptor who was married to an admiral and had a
young daughter. Mabel Batten died in 1915, and in 1917 Radclyffe
Hall and Una Troubridge began living together. A black and white
photograph showing Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge together
c1927 is reproduced in Jivani
(1997), page 29. A back and white photograph of 37 Holland
Street, London, W8 where they lived from 1924 to 1929, and where
most of The Well of Loneliness was written, is reproduced
in Elliman
and Roll, (1986), page 93.
In the 1920s she began writing novels and
writing under the name of Radclyffe Hall. Her Adam's Breed
in 1926, was the only novel, apart from E. M. Forster's A
Passage to India, to be awarded both the Prix Femina and the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize...
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By Heather Love, University of Virginia
Excerpt:
In her groundbreaking 1984 article "The
Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,"
Esther Newton offered a radical new reading of The Well of
Loneliness, and of its heroine, Stephen Gordon, whom Newton
introduced as "[w]ithout question, the most infamous mannish
lesbian of all time." (Newton, 559) For fifteen years Hall's
1928 novel had been the subject of intense criticism in the
lesbian community. With its "third sex" heroine,
butch-femme romance, and tragic ending, The Well found
few champions among the lesbian feminists of the 1970's, whose
model of lesbianism "as the ultimate form of femaleness"
did not account for the likes of Stephen Gordon. Challenging the
"anti-Well approach" of earlier critics, Newton pointed
to the historical necessity of Stephen's mannishness. Newton
credited Hall with disrupting "the asexual model of romantic
friendship" (Newton, 560) of the 19th century and with giving
us the first self-defining and fully sexual lesbian character in
literature...
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From GayGate.com
Excerpt:
When The Well of Loneliness was published
to much attention in the U.S., it engendered a far-ranging
discussion of the forbidden topic and, more than any other
document of its time, brought lesbian existence out in the open.
The British ban on the book was not repealed until after Hall's
death fifteen years later. (It is interesting that Virginia Woolf's
Orlando, her whimsical paean to lover Vita Sackville-west, was
published the same year as The Well of Loneliness without
provoking similar controversy: perhaps because Woolf and Sackville-West
were both married and dressed like women rather than men.) After
the scandal, Hall and Troubridge deemed it prudent to leave
England and lived abroad for several years. Though Hall published
other novels, including The Master of the House (1932) and The
Sixth Beatitude (1936), she never again touched on the
controversial topic that had made her notorious...
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From Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin
This manuscript collection of the British
novelist Radclyffe Hall and her companion of 28 years, Una
Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, is added to material previously
received at the HRHRC, including a typescript of Hall's The
Sixth Beatitude and letters of Hall and Troubridge to Evguenia
Souline, 1934-1942 which are cataloged separately. This accretion
includes holograph notebooks and typescript drafts of Hall's
works, as well as business papers, photographs, scrapbooks, and
piano-vocal scores; and Troubridge's day books and diaries,
correspondence, translations, drafts and galleys of her biography
of Hall, and photograph and clippings albums. After Hall's death
in 1943, this material remained in Troubridge's possession and was
bequeathed to her friend Nicola Rossi-Lemeni upon her death in
1963. The collection is organized in two groups, beginning with
the works of Radclyffe Hall followed by the papers of Una
Troubridge.
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
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