Hall, Radclyffe 1880–1943

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Hall, Radclyffe
1880–1943

Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, born on August 12, 1880, in Bournemouth, England, is best known for The Well of Loneliness (1928), the first English novel to focus on female homosexuality. Hall had an unhappy childhood but inherited a fortune that ensured her independence. After several lesbian affairs she settled down, at age twenty-eight, with fifty-two-year-old Mabel Batten. Known to friends as John and Ladye, they considered themselves married. Batten introduced Hall to Catholicism, and Hall converted in 1912. In 1915 Hall, who had published six books of poems and begun writing fiction, fell in love with Batten's cousin, twenty-eight-year-old Una Troubridge, who was married to a man twenty-five years her senior. When Batten died in 1916, the guilt-ridden pair began years of séances through which they claimed to communicate with her. Hall and Troubridge lived together until Hall's death in London on October 7, 1943. In her last years she fell in love with a Russian emigrant, Evguenia Souline, which damaged but did not destroy her relationship with Troubridge.

Hall was a highly successful novelist, publishing The Unlit Lamp and The Forge in 1924, A Saturday Life in 1925, and Adam's Breed, which won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, in 1926. She and Troubridge became well-known figures among the literati and also in homosexual circles in London and Paris; photos and caricatures of Hall, in stylish manlike attire, appeared regularly in fashionable magazines.

Hall had discreetly addressed the subject of women's attraction to women in her first novel, The Unlit Lamp; she said that she decided to write The Well from a sense of duty, in defense of the defenseless. She knew she was jeopardizing her career—her homosexual colleagues, such as Noël Coward, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Mansfield, and even the flamboyant Lytton Strachey and Vita Sackville-West, wrote about homosexuality only indirectly in works published during their lifetime.

The Well, dedicated to "our three selves" (Batten, Troubridge, and herself), tells the story of Stephen Gordon, a noble, upright Christian woman, who, from childhood, feels and acts like a boy. After an affair with a married woman, Stephen is exiled from home. She becomes a famous novelist, and fights heroically in World War I, during which she falls in love with Mary Llewellyn. They settle down in Paris and make many homosexual friends. Among the characters based on Hall's contemporaries is Valerie Seymour, based on the American expatriate lesbian writer Natalie Barney. Their rejection by the mainstream world, however, depresses Mary, who becomes attracted to Stephen's friend Martin. Realizing that Mary would marry Martin, but for her loyalty to Stephen, Stephen pretends to have an affair so that Mary will feel free to leave with Martin, which she does. The novel ends with Stephen dedicating her talent to oppressed homosexuals, and crying out to God to acknowledge and defend his homosexual children.

Refused by three publishers, The Well was published by Jonathan Cape, with a preface by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, whose model of homosexuality as inversion Hall had adopted. For a month the book was favorably reviewed; then, James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, wrote an editorial titled "A Book That Must Be Suppressed," traducing it for purveying moral poison. The book became an overnight bestseller, and the British government's home secretary ordered its withdrawal. Several celebrities, including Forster and Woolf, protested this censorship. Cape transferred publication to Paris and imported copies into Britain.

The British government then prosecuted The Well under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Refusing to hear expert witnesses in its favor, including doctors, clergymen, and novelists, Judge Chartres Biron banned the book as an obscene libel (from Latin libellus, a little book). A huge public controversy followed during which Hall and her work were caricatured and parodied. But The Well became an instant success around the world. The Society for the Suppression of Vice tried unsuccessfully to get it banned in the United States, and it is Hall's only novel to have remained continuously in print. The ban in England was lifted in 1949.

The Well was condemned because it represented homosexuals as worthy people, innately inverted through no fault of their own, and deserving sympathy and respect. Until then most fiction had depicted them as criminal perverts who ended up either dying or converting to heterosexuality. The Well brought to life a range of homosexuals, male and female, from different classes, races, religions, and professions, all unjustly persecuted but surviving and contributing to society.

Following the rise of lesbian feminism in the 1970s, many critics have condemned The Well for depicting Stephen as a self-hating lesbian who masochistically sacrifices her own happiness by driving Mary into Martin's arms. Others argue that The Well is written in the style of Victorian social realism, drawing both on well-established tragic conventions and on Biblical language to elevate its protagonist and evoke readers' empathy for her as a victim of injustice. Either way The Well remains an undisputed lesbian classic, the work that paved the way for subsequent explicit lesbian writing.