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Contents Hall Questions | Hall Bio | Sexual Inversion | Hall Links
Hall Questions
Hall Bio Source: http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/johnhall.html Radclyffe Hall Born 12th. August, 1880, in Bournemouth, Dorset; died 7th. October, 1943, in Dolphin Square, London. Born Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, the daughter of Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall. She was known as Peter as a child but later called herself John, probably after her great-grandfather whom she strongly resembled. She was educated at King's College, London, and then in Germany. Between 1906 and 1915 she published five volumes of poetry, mostly about "that potent passion, that divine desire" which she felt for women. Several of her verses were set to music, some by Coleridge Taylor. Her most famous song was The Blind Ploughman, with music by Coningsby Clarke. In 1907 the poetry brought her to the attention of the 50-year-old Mabel Batten, who was married with a grown-up daughter. They fell in love and set up home together when Batten's husband died. 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. [. . .] 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. In 1928 she wrote The Well of Loneliness, the first undisguised lesbian novel and largely autobiographical. This caused a storm and James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express, declared in a front-page article, "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." [. . .] The book was banned in Britain but Jonathan Cape sent the type-moulds to Paris where Pegasus Press published it. Copies were sent all over the world including Britain where Customs seized copies on the way to Leonard Hill's bookshop in Great Russell Street. Leonard Hill was charged, and defense lawyers gathered support for the book from leading intellectuals including E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Laurence Housman. However, the magistrate disallowed the evidence as to the merit of the work and ruled that it was an "obscene libel" and it was suppressed. However the book continued to be published abroad and was very popular, particularly in America. It was translated into eleven languages and sold a million copies during the author's lifetime. [. . .] She never repeated this success with her other novels. [. . .] All of her books were dedicated to "The three of us", the other two being Mabel Batten and Una Troubridge. Ground-breaking as it was The Well of Loneliness, would now seem dated as it reflects the then current theories of "sexual inversion" to which Radclyffe Hall subscribed. She also cultivated the stereotype of the masculine lesbian. However the notoriety of her work brought lesbianism to the consciousness of the British public and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world which had previously been able to largely ignore it.
Radclyffe Hall was listed at number 16 in the top 500 lesbian and gay heroes in The Pink Paper, 26th. September, 1997, issue 500, page 22. Her The Well of Loneliness was number 7 of the list of the top 100 gay books compiled in the USA in 1999.
Sexual Inversion Source: http://www.gayhistory.com Karl Westphal, a respected German physician, professor, and journal editor published an article in the German language Archive for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in which he identified a new psychiatric disorder. He wrote that women and men whose sexual desires turn toward members of their own sex possess "contrary sexual feeling" and tend to have associated mental illnesses. Women with this disorder are unusually masculine, and men with contrary sexual feeling are effeminate. Reasoning that the cause was probably congenital, Westphal opposed laws like paragraph 175. He favored medical treatment instead. Through a series of mistranslations, the phenomenon Westphal called "contrary sexual feeling" came to be called sexual inversion in English.
Hall Links Um, well, gosh, kind of surprisingly, there really aren't very many. Most of them tend to be individual's pages, which aren't that reliable.
Last Updated January 26, 2003 | Questions? Picture
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