Radclyffe Hall

Three names, one of them on the books

She was christened Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall. She published as Radclyffe Hall, dropping the first name and the hyphen, from her first book of verse in 1906 onwards. Friends called her John, a name Mabel Batten gave her early in their affair and which she answered to for the rest of her life. All three are hers. The books carry Radclyffe Hall, and so does the English Heritage plaque in Kensington.

Her father, Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, left the family when she was two. Her mother, an American widow from Philadelphia named Mary Jane Diehl, remarried a singing professor, Alberto Visetti, and the household was not a happy one. What made the writing life possible was money: at twenty-one Hall inherited a fortune from her grandfather, and never afterwards had to earn a living. She wrote because she wanted to, and later paid her own legal costs for the same reason.

A prize-winning novelist before the scandal

Hall began in verse. Five collections appeared between 1906 and 1915, and one poem from Songs of Three Counties, The Blind Ploughman, was set to music by Robert Coningsby Clarke in 1913 and became a standard of the ballad concert. It is the only thing she wrote that reached a mass audience before the trial did the job for her.

The novels came in her forties, and came quickly:

• The Unlit Lamp (1924), written first under the title Octopi — a daughter kept at home by a mother who needs her, and never allowed a life of her own.
• The Forge (1924), a comedy of an artistic marriage, published ahead of The Unlit Lamp because publishers thought it the safer debut.
• A Saturday Life (1925), about a girl who takes up one art after another.
• Adam's Breed (1926), the story of an Italian waiter in London who ends by starving himself in a wood.
• The Well of Loneliness (1928).
• The Master of the House (1932), The Sixth Beatitude (1936), and the story collection Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1934) followed the ban.

Adam's Breed took the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, both awarded in 1927. Only one novel had taken both before it, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. This is the fact most accounts of 1928 leave out: the woman whose book the state destroyed had, the year before, won the two prizes an English novelist most wanted.

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness follows Stephen Gordon from her birth on a Worcestershire estate to middle age in Paris. Her father wanted a son and gave her the name he had chosen; she grows up riding, fencing and reading, falls in love with women, is turned out of her home for it, drives an ambulance in France in the war, and settles at last in a house on the Left Bank with the woman she loves. The book calls her an invert, the term the sexologists of the day used, and Havelock Ellis supplied a one-page Commentary for the first edition vouching for its psychological accuracy. Hall dedicated it To Our Three Selves.

There is almost no sex in it. The single sentence that describes a night together reads, in full, "and that night they were not divided". What the book does instead is argue. It states that women like Stephen are made this way, that they are not sick and not wicked, and that they are owed a place. The last page has Stephen crying out to God for it.

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet—you've not got your niche in creation.

The speaker is Puddle, Stephen's governess, and the point of the scene is that she never says it aloud. She rehearses the speech, loses her nerve, and lets the girl go on believing she is a monster. Readers wrote to Hall for the rest of her life about that passage.

The Sunday Express, the Home Secretary and Bow Street

Jonathan Cape published the novel on 27 July 1928 at fifteen shillings, roughly double the price of an ordinary novel, which was a deliberate signal that this was a serious book for serious readers. The early reviews were calm and several were warm.

On 19 August the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, ran a leading article headed "A Book That Must Be Suppressed". He argued that the cleverness of the book made it more dangerous, not less, and demanded its immediate withdrawal.

I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.

Cape sent a copy to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, and asked for a view. The view came back that the book must be withdrawn. Cape withdrew it, then quietly licensed the text to the Pegasus Press in Paris and had copies shipped back into England. Customs seized a consignment at Dover in October, and the Director of Public Prosecutions moved against Cape and the London distributor Leopold Hill under the Obscene Publications Act 1857.

The case was heard at Bow Street Magistrates' Court from 9 November 1928. Around forty witnesses had come to speak for the book, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster among them. The Chief Magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, would not hear them: whether a book was obscene, he held, was a question for the court and not for novelists. Hall sat in court through all of it and was never called. On 16 November Biron ruled the novel an obscene libel and ordered every copy destroyed. His reasoning was not that the book was indecent but that it asked for lesbian lives to be tolerated rather than condemned.

The appeal was heard at the County of London Sessions on 14 December before Sir Robert Wallace and a bench of magistrates, and was dismissed with costs. Hall helped pay them by selling her London house. The Well of Loneliness was not published in Britain again until Falcon Press brought it out in 1949, six years after her death.

New York reached the opposite verdict

The American rights went to Covici-Friede, a New York firm five months old, which published the book in January 1929. John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had copies seized within weeks, and in February a magistrate named Hyman Bushel found the novel obscene and sent the publishers for trial.

On 19 April 1929 the Court of Special Sessions cleared it. The court held that a book dealing with a delicate social problem does not break the law simply by dealing with it. Covici-Friede printed a two-volume victory edition carrying their lawyer Morris Ernst's account of the case, and the novel sold in numbers Hall's earlier books had never approached.

Two courts, one text, five months apart, opposite results. Nothing in the book had changed.

Mabel Batten and Una Troubridge

Hall met Mabel Batten at the spa at Homburg in 1907. Batten was fifty, married, a grandmother and a singer of some reputation, and the two became lovers the following year. Batten steered her reading, brought her into the Roman Catholic Church in 1912, and called her John. She died in 1916, after a cerebral haemorrhage that followed a quarrel between them, and Hall carried the guilt of that quarrel for years.

The quarrel was about Una Troubridge. Una was Batten's younger cousin, a sculptor and translator married to a naval officer; Hall met her on 1 August 1915 and they were lovers by November. They set up house together in 1917 and stayed together until Hall died twenty-six years later. Troubridge translated Colette into English for British readers, put her own work aside to run Hall's, and wrote the first biography of her in 1961.

The 1921 census recorded the two of them at the same address as joint heads of household, which the form did not really allow for and which almost no other pair of women in the country claimed. It is a small piece of paper and a clear statement.

Paris, Natalie Barney and Valérie Seymour

Hall met Natalie Clifford Barney through the women she knew in London, along with Barney's partner the painter Romaine Brooks. Barney was an American writer who had lived in Paris since 1902, wrote in French, and had been holding a Friday salon at 20 rue Jacob since 1909. She lived as a lesbian without any concealment at all, which in 1928 made her the most useful model in Europe for what Hall wanted to put on the page.

Valérie Seymour is the first person Stephen Gordon meets in Paris and the only character in the novel entirely at ease with herself. She is an American whose parties everybody goes to, and the book calls her a creature born out of her epoch, a pagan chained to an age that was Christian. Everyone else in Stephen's Paris is unhappy. Valérie is not, and the novel cannot quite explain why, which is the most interesting thing about her.

It is Valérie who tells Stephen about a tumbledown house with a good garden in the rue Jacob, and Stephen buys it: number 35, in the same short street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés as Barney's number 20. Hall put her heroine four doors and a few numbers from the real address.

What the record shows is that Hall knew Barney, and that the Paris chapters draw on Barney's circle. Later accounts also place Hall among the Friday guests at 20 rue Jacob, and the guest map Barney published in 1929 would settle it, but no source consulted for this page documents her attendance, so nothing here claims it.

Séances, and a slander case

After Mabel Batten died, Hall went to the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard to try to reach her. She and Troubridge sat with Leonard weekly through 1916 and 1917, taking turns as questioner and note-taker, and Hall wrote the whole thing up as a report published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1919. It is a long, careful, sceptical document, and it made her name in a field that had nothing to do with fiction. She sat on the Society's council and resigned in 1924 to write.

The council seat also produced a court case. In 1920, while her name was before the Society, St George Lane Fox-Pitt told its secretary that Radclyffe Hall was a grossly immoral woman. Hall sued him for slander in the King's Bench and won. It was her first experience of a courtroom, and it went considerably better than the second.

Last years and death

In 1934, at a spa at Bagnoles-de-l'Orne in Normandy, Hall fell in love with a White Russian nurse called Evguenia Souline, thirty years old to her fifty-four. The attachment lasted the rest of her life and caused Troubridge lasting pain. Troubridge did not leave. The three of them travelled, quarrelled and wrote to one another for nine years, and Hall left Souline an annuity.

Hall was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the rectum in March 1943 and died at her flat in Pimlico on 7 October, aged sixty-three, with Troubridge beside her. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, in the Circle of Lebanon, in the vault that already held Mabel Batten.

Troubridge inherited everything, moved to Italy, and died in Rome in 1963. The papers went to the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, the letters to Souline to the University of Birmingham. The Well of Loneliness has been in print continuously since 1949. Its psychology has dated badly and its argument has not: it was the first English novel to ask, in public and under the author's own name, that lesbian lives be left alone.