Radclyffe Hall (Marguerite Antonia Hall)

 

·        12 Aug. 1880 – 7 Oct 1943

·        born to Mary Jane Diehl Sager Radclyffe-Hall of Philadelphia and

·        Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall

·        grandfather a tuberculosis specialist provided inheritance; father didn’t need to work

·        parents separated soon after her birth, divorced 1882

·        mother remarried 1889 and family resided in London

·        Hall neglected by all 3 parents; saw father 2 or 3 times before his death when she was 18

·        inherited family fortune at 21

·        traveled and studied at King’s College, London and Dresden

·        1906 – bought house in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire

·        1906 – 1st book of poetry: Twixt Earth and Stars; many of the poems set to music

·        1907 – met Mabel Veronica Batten, “Ladye”, an amateur singer

·        1908 – the two became lovers; Hall converted to Catholicism; pub. A Sheaf of Verses; adopted masculine attire and nickname ‘John’

·        1910 – Poems of the Past and Present

·        1913 – Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems

·        W.W.I – worked for Red Cross

·        1915 – The Forgotten Island; caring for Ladye who was very ill; Hall involved with Una Vincent Troubridge, Battens’s cousin and wife of Admiral Troubridge

·        1916 –  before death, Batten accuses Hall of infidelity; Hall and Troubridge determined to assuage their guilt by making lives a memorial to Ladye

·        1924 – The Forge – social comedy about the necessity of marriage; The Unlit Lamp about mother-daughter relations

·        1925 – Adam’s Breed – won the Prix Fémina Vie Heureuse, James Tait Black Award and the American Eichelbergher Award

·        1928 – The Well of Loneliness – used research of Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing that homosexuality was congenital; tends to show lesbianism as affliction

Publication History

·        pub. same year as Woolf’s Orlando and Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, neither of which had censorship problems – Woolf and Sackville were married to men and dressed as women; Woolf’s lesbian content coded; MacKenzie's book satire; Hall financially secure so could afford to risk poor sales

·        difficult to find publisher for The Well of Loneliness; Heinemann liked it but "our courage is not as great as hers" (Cline 236)

·        Jonathan Cape gave Hall Ł500 advance (cf. Ł100 for previous novel Adam's Breed) ; planned to print 1250 copies at 25 shillings (3x price of average book) to keep novel out of the hands of sensation seekers (Cline); if novel sold well, he planned to produce 2nd, cheaper edition. Eventually reduced price to 15 chillings and made 1500 copies; intro from Ellis added after Hall wrote and asked him for contribution

·        pub. advertised in 7 daily newspapers; Over 2 week period reviewed in Saturday Review, TLS, Leonard Woolf in The Nation, Sunday Times and Evening Standard gave positive reviews although some critics dubious about didactic content; later Time and Tide, TP's Weekly and Daily Telegraph which called it "a work of art finely conceived and finely written" (Cline 242).

·        18 Aug, Daily Express ran ad that Sunday's paper would call for supression of unnamed book; Sunday Express showed picture of Hall in man's smoking jacket with bow tie, skirt, and smoking cigarette; James Douglas wrote 5 columns to demand book be withdrawn.

"This pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls.

I have seen the plague walking shamelessly through great social assemblies. I have heard it whispered about by young men and young women who do not and cannot grasp its unutterable putrefaction...

This novel forces upon our society a disagreeable task which it has hiterto shirked, the task of cleansing itself from the leprosy of these lepers...

It is a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading desgined to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted upon these outcasts by a cruel society. It flings a veil of sentiment over their depravity. It even suggests that their self-made debasement is unavoidable, because they cannot save themselves...

If Christianity does not destroy this doctrine, then this doctrine will destroy it...

It is meet and right to pity them, but we must also pity their victims. We must protect our children... I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul...

Finally, let me warn our novelists and our meon of letters that literature as well as morality is in peril. Fiction of this type is an injury to good literature. It makes the profession of literature fall into disrepute. Literature has not yet recovered from the harm done to it by the Oscar Wilde scandal. It should keep its house in order" (Sunday Express, August 19, 1928 quoted in Cline 243)

 

·        Cape ordered 3000 more copies and wrote Daily Express to defend publication; sent novel to Home Secretary with Douglas's review and asked for Sir William Joynson-Hick's opinion; Joyson-Hicks found it "obscene" and Cape stopped printing; note that Hicks wrote books on the censorship of morals (Brittain 25).

Cape had plaster molds made of printing plates and sent to Paris ;subleased rights to second press so that English booksellers could order novel; Customs impounded a shipment; shipment was released, but confiscated by police using 1857 Obscene Publications Act; bookseller and Cape charged

·        Woolfs, Shaw, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, and Vita Sackville-West offered to testify on behalf of defense, but court rejected their claims as irrelevant

·        book found obscene and not repub. in U.K. until 1949;

·        Attempts to publish in U.S.: turned down by Doubleday, Houghton-Mifflin and Harpers; pub. by Covici-Friede, who was taken to court by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; book sales doubled - sold 20,000 copies in 1 mo and topped best seller list (Brittain)

·        Covici-Friede sent plates out of state; convicted in 1929 due to presence of obscene passages; ruling overturned in appeal; Hall made Ł6000 in royalties from U.S. editions; sales of other Hall books increased; sold in Pairs "hundred copies a day" (Cline) and translated in several other languages.

·        Hall and Troubridge lived abroad for several years to avoid attention; Mackenzie's book was advertised as having a character modeled after Hall; The Sink of Solitude - a saatiric poem with cartoons by Beresford Egan that mocked Joynson-Hicks (aka Jix), Cape and Hall

·        1932 – The Master of the House – Christian allegory; best seller, but poor critical reception

·        1934 – short stories: Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself

·        1936 – The Sixth Beatitude; 6000 copies in U.K., 2000 U.S., but negative reviews; Hall thought it her best book

·        Troubridge ill and Hall becomes involved with Eugenia Souline, Russian exile

·        1940s tuberculosis aggravated by smoking, cancer, pneumonia; buried next to Batten