High Collars & Monocles 1 - Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

HIGH COLLARS & MONOCLES 1920s Novels from Female Couples edited by

francis booth

At Miss Barney’s one met the ladies with high collars and monocles.

Sylvia Beach

Cover illustration by Peter Wild

Contents

Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge.............................................................................. 4 Radclyffe Hall, The Forge (1924) ....................................................................26 Radclyffe Hall, The Unlit Lamp (1924) ..........................................................31 Radclyffe Hall, A Saturday Life (1925) ..........................................................45 Radclyffe Hall, Adam's Breed (1926)..............................................................50 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928) ...............................................63 The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall ..............................................................82

High Collars & Monocles

Part 1

RADCLYFFE HALL & UNA TROUBRIDGE

In 1915, I was living in a tiny house in Bryanston Street; for very good reasons I was deeply depressed and intensely lonely. But for these facts I might not have accepted an invitation from my cousin Lady Clarendon to have tea with her in Cambridge Square on August 1st . . . I can still see John [as Radclyffe Hall was known to her friends] as I saw her on that day, as clearly as if she stood before me now. She was then thirty-four years of age and very good indeed to look upon. . . . She was exceedingly handsome, had plenty of charm, plenty of intelligence, plenty of money, no education to speak of and was out exclusively to enjoy herself and to give others a good time. . . Her face and the line of her jaw were an unusually pure oval. From great-grandfather John Hall she had inherited an aquiline nose with delicate, tempered wings to the nostrils. From the mythical AmericanIndian, unusually high cheekbones. In any case it was not the countenance of a young woman but of a very handsome young man. . . . Altogether her appearance was calculated to arouse interest. It immediately aroused mine and for reasons much less obvious that interest was returned. Our friendship, which was to last through life and after it, dated from that meeting.

Una Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

Hall’s masculinity, sartorially, is of the exquisitely tailor-made kind, and she is one of the handsomest women I have ever met . . . She has a beautiful head, and sleek close-cropped fair hair with a slight wave; keen, steel-grey eyes, a small, sensitive mouth, a delicately aquiline nose, and a charming boyish smile, which lights up the pale gravity of her face remarkably, dispelling that faint suggestion of severity, which it has in repose. She has slender ankles and wrists, and beautiful, sensitive fingers, and she is slightly built without giving an impression of smallness; there is about her, generally, a curious mingling of sensitiveness and strength, a sort of clean-cut hardness.

Ethel Mannin

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Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

At Miss [Natalie Clifford] Barney’s one met the ladies with high collars and monocles, though Miss Barney herself was so feminine. Unfortunately, I missed the chance to make the acquaintance at her salon of the authoress of The Well of Loneliness, in which she concluded that if inverted couples could be united at the altar, all their problems would be solved.

Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company

The recipient of the recently awarded Femina Prize, Miss Radclyffe Hall, began lisping in numbers when she was three, and during her adolescence she published several volumes of poetry which she prefers should remain unhonoured and unsung. Later, she won success with Poems of the Past and Present and Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems, before the War added to its record of slain books The Forgotten Island. Embarking on short story writing, one of them, The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes – the tale of an educated American Negro – so struck the late William Heinemann, when he read it, that he declared it was one of the best he had ever seen, and proposed to publish a volume of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s short stories after she had written a novel. War work, howev-

er, prevented her settling down to the latter, and while she was writing it later – it was The Unlit Lamp – Mr. Heinemann died suddenly. This caused Miss Radclyffe Hall to put it on one side, and she began a humorous book which was accepted by the first publisher who saw it, and as The Forge made a certain success. Then she went back to The Unlit Lamp, finished it, and established her position in the literary world. It was followed

by A Saturday Life, a return to her humorous style, and then came Adam’s Breed, which won the Femina prize. It was written in five months, against the three years occupied in writing her other serious book, The Unlit Lamp.

The Sphere, April 30, 1927

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High Collars & Monocles

There were the ultra modern types of Una Lady Troubridge, with her square-cut shingle and her monocle, and Radclyffe Hall with her corn-

coloured hair Eton cropped and wearing a severe silver evening coat.

Miss Radclyffe Hall, authoress of the withdrawn novel, “The Well of Loneliness,” is a woman conspicuous in any gathering by reason of her appearance and dress. Long before the Eton crop acquired a vogue she wore her hair close cut as any man’s and her dress approaches closely that of a male, with the difference that she wears a skirt. In the evening she has coats of black bro-

cade, ruffled shirts, socks, and pumps.

She is a great first-nighter in company with her devoted friend, Una Lady Troubridge, is interested in old oaks and dogs, dabbles in spiritualism, and has a sitting in the Jesuit church in Farmstreet.

LED THE SHINGLE FASHION

Lady Troubridge, who was one of the very first in the country to be shingled, wears a monocle, a mode not often seen with women.

Besides being the author of several clever novels she breeds dogs and is an inspector of the RSPCA.

A very versatile person is Una, Lady Troubridge. Anyone who has not done so should read her book, just published, on “Etiquette.”

[The writer has Una, Lady Troubridge confused with the prolific novelist Laura, Lady Troubridge, who was no relation to Una.]

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The Daily Mirror, 1926

Londonderry Sentinel, September 4, 1928

‘Chatty Gossip of the Day,’ Sunday Post, April 4, 1926

Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

The tide of fashion has turned again in favour of monocles. Women are among the devotees, and there is a secret whispered in connection with the new fashion which was revealed yesterday by a well-known optician.

“A number of the monocles are made of plain glass,” he said. “This means that they are not at all necessary to the sight and are being worn solely as a personality attribute.

“The majority of wearers, however stoutly maintain that the monocle they wear is really necessary to their sight, but, of course, as soon as we test their eyes we know that this is not so in many cases. As a matter of fact the wearing of a monocle when it is not strictly necessary is bad for the eyesight.

“The women who buy them from us are always of the masculine type.

They like them to complete their getup of collar and tie, and usually choose them rimmed with tortoiseshell, gold or steel.”

The history of the monocle is interesting. They were invented, it is believed, as far back as 1814 when a Dutch exquisite appeared at the Vienna Congress with a “single glass set in a smart ring.”

Since that time they have been alternately fashionable and unfashionable; have been banned among officials of the Police Department in Germany, and have been a craze in Vienna and Paris.

English devotees of the monocle fashion include Miss Heather Thatcher, Miss Vera Hutchinson, the authoress, and Lady Troubridge.

Where the interieur de style ancien scores is certainly in the fact that it is a kindly setting for young and old, slim or stout alike, it is, so to write, hospitably becoming. The svelte (so often a euphemism for scrawny) silhouette looks charming against the old brocade of a Louis XV bergère, while a middle-aged-Unfortunate with her middle age spread fits as harmoniously as it is possible for her to do into the background it affords, while she invariably looks her age (and a bit over) in

the bleakness of a modern décor. Mine own eyes have told me how Colette’s delightful home provides an equally successful setting for her young daughter’s sturdy boyishness, or for Francis Carco’s rotund proportions, for Radclyffe Hall’s sternly-tailored sparseness, Madame Leopold Marchand’s softly-draped curves, or for Lady Una Troubridge’s monocle.

Weekly Dispatch, June 9, 1929

Priscilla in Paris, The Tatler, May 29, 1929

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High Collars & Monocles

THE NEAT TAILOR-MADE As the new novel, “The Forge” bears on its cover the name “Radclyffe Hall,” many think that the author is a man.

The writer is Miss Radclyffe Hall, the friend of Una Lady Troubridge, with whom she owns one of the best-known dog kennels in England. When she is sitting in the stalls at a theatre, too, many think the author is a very handsome man, sitting with Una Lady Troubridge. She has won her hair close cropped, like a man’s, for years, long before bobbing or shingling came into vogue. And she never wears evening dress of the ordinary female type.

“I like to be comfortable,” she says.

“And there’s nothing more comfortable than the tailored suits I always wear.”

She does not possess a frock in her wardrobe. Instead, she wears, in the day, a severely tailored coat and skirt, white shirt blouse, with a four-in-hand tie or a check bow. And in the evening she dons a black silk or black cloth, tailored suit, with a silk frilled or tucked shirt, a high collar, and a black tie. And she seldom swerves from wearing black or grey.

Lady Troubridge, in the daytime, always wears tailored clothes, too, with a monocle. The other day she wore black stockings with her blackand-white pin-striped skirt, and black coat, much like a man’s morning clothes, and her stockings had white clocks up to the sides, just like a man’s socks. To complete the man-abouttown air, she wore fawn felt spats.

These two striking women live together in Knightsbridge, in a house full of the most beautiful Tudor oak.

“Dogs and first nights are Miss Radclyffe Hall’s amusements,” said Lady Troubridge, talking about her literary success. “Another serious novel of hers is to be published soon, and now she is engaged on a third book.”

These two women have gained over eight hundred prizes in a year for their champion Dachshunds, which they have been breeding for many years now. They recently sent a Dachshund out to British East Africa to join a kennel of trained lion trackers. John Wanamaker, the famous American dry-goods magnate, has just bought one; so have Lady Cholmondley and Lady Congreve.

The People, March 2, 1924

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Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

That queer woman dressed up as a porter and the other one with the eyeglass, I should never have known they were women.

Radclyffe Hall, The Forge

‘My darling!’ she exclaimed in a protesting voice, ‘what is the matter with your hat! You’ve done something queer to the crown. And I don’t like that collar and tie, it’s so mannish looking.’

Radclyffe Hall, The Unlit Lamp

Lady Shore sat and blinked at her, struck as always by her friend’s personality, by her wonderful, shining sprackness. Her dark hair shone, especially on the temples, where there appeared a gentlemanly greyness. Her black eyes, flat set and Oriental looking, were almost as bright as her eyeglass; even her thick eyebrows looked well-groomed and glossy. Her skin, the colour of the very best vellum, was drawn neatly over her face; her nose was austere; her mouth hard bitten, but redeemed by a sense of humour. She was well above the average height and as trim about the flanks as a racehorse. She gave the impression of perpetual fitness; you felt that she was always in show condition and would certainly win in the ring.

Even Lady Shore did not know how old she was, she changed so remarkably little.

They had met in Egypt ten years before, and Frances looked much the same now as then. . . .

David wished that Frances would dress a little better, he thought her clothes so unbecoming. He liked a woman to wear soft, clinging things, even if she were past her youth. He thought that Frances looked rather odd, especially in the evenings. He disliked her eyeglass, it made people stare.

Radclyffe Hall, The Saturday Life

She would wander away, leaving the porter to think to himself: ‘She don’t look like a girl as would have a young man, but you never can tell. Anyhow she seems anxious — I do hope it’s all right for the poor young lady.’ He grew to take a real interest in Stephen, and would sometimes talk to his wife about her: ‘Have you

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High Collars & Monocles

noticed her, Alice? A queer-looking girl, very tall, wears a collar and tie — you know, mannish. And she seems just to change her suit of an evening — puts on a dark one — never wears evening dress. The mother’s still a beautiful woman; but the girl — I dunno, there’s something about her — anyhow I’m surprised she’s got a young man; though she must have, the way she watches the posts, I sometimes feel sorry for her.’

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

The Sphere, September 25, 1926

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Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

I met Lady Troubridge and her great friend, Margaret [sic] Radclyffe Hall, at the P.E.N. Club monthly dinner the other night, and was much to intrigued with their appearance.

Both these literary ladies wear monocles with broad black ribbons, and both have closely-shingled hair.

Lady Troubridge has the front of her shingle arranged in mediaeval page style, with a straight fringe brushed over her forehead, and she poses a tricky little black patch on her right cheekbone, a monocle being in her left eye.

Margaret Radclyffe Hall, who is the gifted author of that brilliant novel, “Adam’s Breed,” has an even more striking personality. She is very tall, and her slightly-silvered golden hair is cut in an Eton crop, and brushed tightly back from her forehead. As she also usually affects a velvet dinner coat, and talks wittily, she has more the air of a diplomat – accentuated by a monocle – than of a novelist.

When I met Una Lady Troubridge the other day she told me that she was on her way to the shops to buy cushions for their party which took place last night, as so many people wanted to come to hear Rosamond Jonson and Taylor Gordon singing Negro spirituals. So I was prepared for a crowd.

The drawing-room floor was covered with cushions, and even Galsworthy took one of these lowly seats and seemed to enjoy it. . . .

But another feature of the evening was the fact that no fewer than three

women – including, of course, the joint hostess, Miss Radclyffe Hall – were wearing dinner jackets, and two of them had starched butterfly collars.

Certainly Miss Radclyffe Hall’s getup – her jacket was of black silk moire last night – suits her remarkably well, but I don’t think many women would care to sacrifice the comfort of evening dress for a stiff collar.

‘Chatty Gossip of the Day,’ Sunday Post, July 11, 1926

Westminster Gazette, July 16, 1927

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High Collars & Monocles

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Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

At the Apollo first night of “The Fairy Tale” the most striking head adornment was a coronet of brilliantly coloured flowers massed on a wide band of cerise velvet ribbon, which tied at the back in a wide-looped, long-ended bow. It was worn by Lady Troubridge, whose short-cut unwaved hair makes her head look like a boy’s, so that the contrast of this most feminine adorn-

ment – and also of long earrings – was rather startling. She always, too, wears the black-ribboned monocle, which is apparently to be adopted this season from reasons of fashion rather than necessity.

As everyone knows, writing affects the eyes, and for this reason most authors wear glasses. But I have found a lady writer, who is the only feminine celebrity I know the sport a monocle.

She is Miss Radclyffe Hall, whose books have been awarded several valuable international literary prizes, and when I saw her dining at the Berkeley one night this week she was almost indistinguishable from many of the

smart men-about-town who occupied adjoining tables.

Miss Radclyffe Hall had adopted the dinner jacket mode – she was the pioneer of this fashion, I believe – and her natty Eton crop and the indispensable monocle all helped to give her a really mannish appearance.

I notice that Miss Radclyffe Hall, who has just secured the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for that fine novel “Adam’s Breed,” is described in some papers as “a monocled woman writer.” Is this correct? I have spoken to Miss Hall many times, but do not recollect her wearing a monocle. Possibly she has been confused with her very close friend, Una, Lady Troubridge. Miss

Radclyffe Hall is Eton-cropped and wore a masculine dinner jacket long before anybody else was doing so. She is not only an able writer, but a most brilliant conversationalist and a wellinformed student of psychic research.

Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, February 16, 1924

The Herald and Leader, January 17, 1928

‘London Letter’ The Citizen, April 13, 1927

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High Collars & Monocles

The Sphere, January 7, 1928

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Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

Miss Radclyffe Hall and Lady Troubridge, in one of a long series of sittings held with the medium Mrs Osborne Leonard, received a message through “Feda” concerning a dog, Billy, which had died about fifteen months prior to this sitting. Lady Troubridge had not seen this dog for eleven years, and it was not known by Miss Radclyffe Hall. Billy was described in detail by Feda, parts of the message being influenced by the spirit of A.V.B., who was the chief source of the communications throughout, and she further mentioned two peculiarities in Billy’s extreme old age. These peculiarities (there are six in all) were (1) that he “had something wrong with his foot” or his back leg . . . “that they used to turn his feet up, and look at them between the toes . . . he didn’t like it,” and (2) “he had a knobby

thing, sticking out on one of his legs.”

These facts were entirely unknown consciously to the sitters, and it would be very difficult to show that they could have been known unconsciously. . . It would be straining probability too far to postulate that Lady Troubridge could have foreseen the complicated development of physical ailments incurred by the suffering Billy in extreme old age. . . We are left, therefore, to consider the vague hypothesis that as these particular facts about Billy’s last days were known to a certain person, or persons, living at the time the message was given, they may have been fished out of the universal content by the unconscious mind of either Lady Troubridge or the medium.

Lady Troubridge has all her life been very fond of dogs, and under the joint kennel prefix of “Fitz-John” has, with her friend, Miss Radclyffe-Hall, been creating a sensation lately with a dog she saw in the street, followed home, and there and then bought.

Fitz-John Wotan has won thirteen first prizes in ten days – that is, at the only three shows at which he has been exhibited! He is a chocolate-and-tan dog, purely German bred from imported parents, and his debut has been a triumph for the kennel. At the Ladies’ Kennel Association Members’ Show at Tattersall’s he won five first prizes in very hot classes, and with his

companion, Fitz-John Thorgils of Tredholt – a red dog – the first prize for dachshund brace. Also – and this was perhaps the most appreciated by his owners – the amiable animal won them a silver cream jug and sugar basin.

The partners are each in their own way artists. Miss Radclyffe-Hall, a slight, spare woman of an excessive neatness, has had five books of poems published, and one had the honour of a preface by no less a writer than Cunningham Graham. The late Mr. Heinemann, on reading some of her short stories, suggested she should

Westminster Gazette, March 6, 1920

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High Collars & Monocles

write a novel, and this is nearly ready for publication.

Lady Troubridge, rosy and with an aureole of outstanding brown hair, is a sculptress who, for seven years in succession exhibited in the Royal Academy, and has done busts of various in-

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teresting people such as Labouchere and Nijinsky, also a statuette of Adeline Genée.

Westminster Gazette, November 27, 1922

Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

ALLEGED SLANDER Case in the King’s Bench In the Kings Bench Division today, before the Lord Chief Justice and a special jury, Miss Marguerite Radcliffe-Hall, of Chip Chase, Hadley Wood, claimed damages for an alleged slander against Mr St. George Lane Fox-Pitt of 54, South Eaton Place, W. As a sequel to the nomination of the plaintiff as a co-opted member of the Psychical Research Society, Mr. Fox-Pitt falsely and maliciously uttered the following slander to Isabel Newton: – “Miss Radclyffe-Hall is a grossly immoral woman. Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge, who has recently been home on leave, has in my presence made very serious accusations against her. He said she had wrecked his home. She ought not to be co-opted as a member of the Council. I didn’t like to be hostile to her at first, but my own opinions about her have been confirmed by what Sir Ernest Troubridge told me . . . Admiral Troubridge is not at all afraid of anything, and would be quite willing to make this statement publicly. She has got a great influence over Lady Troubridge, and has come between her and her husband, and wrecked the Admiral’s home. I am quite determined to oppose her election to the council. If I cannot persuade Mrs Sidgwick to withdraw her proposal of Miss Radclyffe-Hall for the Council, I intend to bring the matter before the Council myself, and put it strongly, so to secure my point, as she

is quite an unfit person to be on the Council.”

The plaintiff contended that by these statements the defendant meant that she was an unchaste and immoral woman, unfit to be a member of the Council or to associate with respectable people, and that she ought to be shunned by all decent members of society.

The defence was that the plaintiff’s statement of claim was misleading, and a malignant version of the facts in the case. The defendant denied the correctness of the words attributed to him, and denied any slander whatever.

He said that the statements made to two officers of the Society were statements of fact, and were without malice, and in the interest of everybody concerned, including the plaintiff herself. . .

In August, 1915, said counsel, the plaintiff met Lady Troubridge, and there sprang up between the ladies a great friendship, with the full approval of Admiral Troubridge. In 1916, Lady Troubridge had been ill, and Miss Radclyffe-Hall, whose means were very much larger than those of Admiral Troubridge, offered to take her away for a holiday. Admiral Troubridge accordingly approved, and took part in the growing friendship between the ladies. He expressed his gratitude to Miss Hall for the friendship which she had bestowed upon his wife and he called her by her pet name, “John.” He suggested that Lady Troubridge should make her home with Miss Hall during the period of his absence upon

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High Collars & Monocles

the important duties on which he was engaged during the war. . .

In May, 1917, the Admiral was in England and he stayed at Miss Hall’s place. In the same year the plaintiff and Lady Troubridge had a house at Datchet together and were visited by Admiral Troubridge.

In November last, however, differences arose between Admiral Troubridge and his wife, and there was a serious scene at the plaintiff’s house.

This was followed on February 8th last by a deed of separation between the Admiral and Lady Troubridge. In

June, 1919, the Admiral was desirous of affecting reconciliation, but his wife refused. In November it was suggested that the plaintiff should be co-opted as a member for the Society for Psychical Research, and a letter was sent out to apprise members of the fact. It appeared that in January Admiral Troubridge was in Paris, and wrote to his wife suggesting that under the circumstances she had better throw in her lot altogether with Miss Radclyffe-Hall.

THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH SLANDER SUIT

was calculated to affect the Psychical Research Society.”

His Lordship, in reply to counsel, said he understood the jury’s verdict was that, in their view, the words were intended to apply, not to the personal character of the plaintiff, but to her work. They had used an awkward word in saying “intended.” They had to say what was the meaning of the words in their natural and ordinary sense.

The jury again retired, and on returning into court in a few moments the foreman said, “we find for the plaintiff – £500 damages.”

Judgement was entered accordingly for the plaintiff for that amount, with costs.

The hearing was resumed yesterday in the King’s Bench Division, before the Lord Chief Justice and a special jury, of the action for alleged slander arising out of the investigation of psychical phenomena by Miss Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, the plaintiff, and Lady Troubridge, wife of Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge. . .

The jury, after an absence of nearly an hour, came into court, and the foreman said, “We find that the defendant did in fact utter the words, ‘a thoroughly immoral woman,’ but that the words were not intended to apply to the plaintiff’s personal character, but to the influence of the research work engaged in by the plaintiff, which

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Portsmouth Evening News, November 18, 1920

Yorkshire Post, November 20, 1920

Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

FIRST NIGHT FASHIONS AT THE KINGSWAY Miss Radclyffe Hall of looked quite surprised when, on leaving the Kingsway Theatre after the first performance of “Thunder on the Left,” she was surrounded by an autographseeking crowd! Hereto the pit and gallery had never done more than stare curiously at her unusual and mannish attire, or criticise it somewhat unflatteringly, but, of course, the ban on her latest book, “The Well of Loneliness,” had given her a new interest and something of a “martyred” importance, and also, that night, there were none of the usual big stage “stars” to claim the attention of the gallery girls – and boys.

Anyway, their new favourite smilingly acceded to all requests and signed any number of autograph books and programmes before driving off in her car with her inseparable companion, Una Lady Troubridge; and a striking pair they made, the authoress with her sleek, fair Eton-cropped hair, a white shirt and black tie, and dinner jacket and skirt and flowing military cape of black face cloth, and Lady Troubridge, with her bobbed hair, straight-cut fringe, and monocle, a simple long-sleeved dress of black marocain with a demurely downturned collar of white embroidered lawn, and a coat of boldly-marked reddish brown and white ponyskin!

Daily Sketch, October 5, 1928

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High Collars & Monocles

The Tatler, March 22, 1934

San Francisco Chronicle, August 2, 1926

The Bookman, April 1926

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Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

Publisher Doubleday Page’s press publicity image for Radclyffe Hall

Daily Sketch, August 13, 1928

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WOMAN NOVELIST’S STRIKE VACATION [From May 4th to 12th 1926, the General Strike in England virtually closed down the country] Lady Novelist’s Relief Work Meantime, I publish this week a very vivid picture of how a very gifted woman of letters spent her time. The writer of the letter is the lady who appears to the public under the name of Radclyffe Hall; I may mention that her last book, “Adam’s Breed,” was one of the many books I read during my vacation in the days of the strike. It was snatched from me by those unscrupulous young lions in my office who take care to get hold of the best books before they let me see them; and one of them wrote quite a good review; but I read the book myself; and I devoured every one of its vivid pages; all dramatic, all moving, though the subject of the story was in what one might well expect to be a somewhat prosaic world – the world of the Italian immigrant who sells tobaccos and sausages and meat in the region of Soho.

Under the Red Cross This is how Radclyffe Hall spent the strike vacation: When the great strike came I thought, “what on earth can I find to do? There are so many volunteers already – actually waiting lists!” And just as I was worrying, my wireless

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spoke: volunteers were needed for the hospitals. The patients required to be driven up for treatment or taken back to their homes.

The next morning a hospital label and a small red cross were pasted onto my windscreen. My week took me into such places as Peckham and Camberwell, to the homes of the very poor. I saw the drab horror of an overcrowded city as seen in its souldeadening slums. I saw eyes that were always strangers to beauty, faces that were sallow from the need of pure air, bodies that were suffering in monotonous discomfort, having little to palliate that suffering.

The Boy and the Banjo Miss Radclyffe Hall goes on to tell of a poor woman whom she drove to see her dead son: The boy had died at a hospital in Sutton; she had only been able to get to him once during his final illness.

There had been no transport at the beginning, and so he had died without her. All the details of that last illness I heard. He had fretted, thinking that his mother would be hurt, thinking that perhaps they were fighting in London, thinking that his parents would not get enough to eat – they were all so poor; there were two other children and the father was an epileptic.

That mother was the breadwinner of the family, a charwoman, working for schools. I had another case that I had to enquire about in

Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

Peckham. I offered to go down to Sutton first, but my charwoman would not have it. “You go to the living child first,” she urged; “mine is gone; I can’t help him any more.”

She spoke very simply to my friend Lady Troubridge, who was helping me in my work. I could hear that quiet, uncomplaining voice, and as I listened I marvelled. I felt very humble and rather ashamed, remembering my own impatience at times.

The boy had been very musical, it seemed; he was only thirteen, but could pick out tunes on a little toy

banjo she had saved up to buy him.

They put that banjo into my motor, and I drove her back with the sad little trophy to her home in Notting Dale.

On the way home the poor woman wanted a paper in order to look out the trains. Miss Radclyffe Hall bought her the paper, “and she offered to pay me, blushing and opening her shabby purse. Of such is the pride of the poor.”

‘T.P.’s Table Talk’ T.P’s and Cassells, May 29, 1926

Being convinced that John’s short stories showed signs of genuine talent she began to wish for their publication and the only means that occurred to her of forwarding this aim was to show them to a potential publisher. She therefore sent them, with an explanatory letter, to an acquaintance who was none other than William Heinemann, at that time at the height of his fame as the discoverer and publisher of unsuspected talent. This was, I think, in 1913. . . Mr. Heinemann repeated and indeed elaborated his favourable criticism of the stories, and even John’s natural shyness, melted by this meed of praise, gave way and she said bluntly and hopefully: ‘Then you are going to publish my stories, Mr. Heinemann?’ To which he replied trenchantly: ‘I will certainly do nothing of the kind. I am not going to present you to the public as the writer of a few short stories, however good they may be, and what is more, I do not want you to offer them to any periodical. You will set to work at once and write me a novel, and when it is finished I will publish it. . . .’ John was disappointed, disconcerted and moreover, as she told me more than once, positively appalled at the suggestion. She protested that she had not the faintest idea even of how to set about writing a novel, had never thought of undertaking a work of any length and felt quite certain that she would never be able to do it, would, as she put it, ‘never stay the course’. ‘Oh yes, you will’, replied Mr. Heinemann. ‘You don’t know it yourself yet, but I know it.

You can and you will and you will bring it to me.’ . . . Whether she felt inspired or not, her method of work never varied. She never herself used a typewriter, in fact she never learned to type and the mere thought 23

High Collars & Monocles

of dictating her inspiration to a typist filled her with horror. She always said that the written word was to her an essential preliminary and she wrote her work with pen or pencil, very illegibly, generally mis-spelt and often without punctuation.

Sometimes she wrote in manuscript books but, especially in later years, often on loose sheets of sermon, paper or indeed on paper of any kind, and to this day I will find scraps covered with sentences and sometimes discover ‘try outs’ on a bit of blotting paper or an old cardboard box. The first draft accomplished, the next step would be to ask me to read her what she had written. Luckily I had so long been familiar with her writing that the wildest scrawl presented little difficulty to me. In feet, I sometimes deciphered hieroglyphics that defeated the ingenuity of their author. . . . I would read and read again as often as she desired and as I read she would dictate alterations and corrections and these I would put down and incorporate in the next reading. (This explains the fact that my handwriting appears on some of her manuscripts.) If she was satisfied with what she had done, the next stage would be dictation to a typist who was trained to her particular method of dictation. This involved never ‘tapping’ while she spoke or while she was reflecting. For as she dictated she continued to polish and the typist had always to be prepared to ‘X’ out at demand any word or sentence and continue her script with the substituted amendment. That script was again read aloud by me, but generally after further correction by John, and so the stages would move on to re-typing, to further readings and further correction until the result satisfied her and reached the goal of the ‘publisher’s copy’ which she insisted should be spotless and practically without corrections.

Una Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

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Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge

The Tatler, November 13, 1935

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High Collars & Monocles

RADCLYFFE HALL, THE FORGE (1924) None of her books was to have a peaceful career and The Unlit Lamp was no exception. She met and conquered all the difficulties of her inexperience, sustained by the memory of a great publisher’s praise. And before the book was half completed came the news of Mr. Heinemann’s unexpected death; she had waited too long to fulfil his prophecy. His firm had the first offer of the book and declined to publish it, as did nine other well-known publishers. They were unanimous in declaring that it was a work of merit, but too long and too depressing to find a public . . . but from somewhere or someone there came a suggestion that if John could write a much shorter, light novel and could get it accepted, it might facilitate the publication of The Unlit Lamp. Depressed and discouraged, she yet held to her conviction that The Unlit Lamp was worthy of success. If it needed a herald, then it should have it and she wrote The Forge in less than five months. It was published by Arrowsmith in 1924 and was very well received; they were eager for more, but they had firmly classified her as a humorous writer and had no use at all for The Unlit Lamp.

Una Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

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The Forge

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High Collars & Monocles

“The Forge,” by Radclyffe Hall concerns two married people charming, cultured, wealthy, devoted and yet they feel chained. They have no children, but they are great lovers of animals and lavish much affection on their dogs. The story starts with their perfectly lovely home in Devonshire, but there their enemy, boredom, finds them, so they flee to town and take refuge in the bosom of society. The man thinks he can write a novel and the woman imagines she can paint; their talent is not big enough, although the woman does manage to paint one picture which is sold to an important French artist. Soon Society is a failure, for their enemy is there and there more than in their quiet country home, so they try to travel. Finally the escape from one another only to be drawn back by their genuine devotion to each other. Nothing dramatic happens but their ups and downs make most delightful reading. The book is written in a very fine style of comedy – a comedy nearly as good as Meredith’s “The Egotist.” Only once does Mr [sic] Radclyffe Hall philosophise, that is at the end of the book. Here the philosophical paragraph is pardonable, for it is explanatory, and after all everybody does not appreciate such subdued, delightful comedy. The philosophy is in these words: “chains my dear, the whole world is just full of them. You see it is just this way, if we were not chained we’d float about like toy balloons. We have to have ballast to keep us down to preventers from being blown away.

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Nature is a very wise old bird, she gets all our needs in one. . . We are cuddled up in civilisation, we ring, so to speak, and the joint appears on the table.

This makes us less able to stand on our own. Look at our friends. You think that one of them is free? Good Lord, no. They’re clanking about just like you and I chained to rank, to family pride, to traditions – to progressive ideas. Of all the chains in the world the heaviest chain is love and it’s so heavy that it almost breaks our hearts. It is the easiest to carry and because of that sometimes deceptive and we think it’s not there – the only way is to keep very close together: a slack chain does not hurt so much as one pulled taut.”

There is no denying that boredom reduces the vitality. It takes the light out of the eye and the springiness out of the foot. It is a microbe that searches through the whole system and ravages it. Great sorrow can be borne.

Despair can be faced. But tedious purposeless boredom takes the happiness out of life. There is not a word of propaganda in “The Forge,” no mention of birth-control or sex, and nothing about children but an unpleasant incident which happens when Italian children follow the English strangers. It must, however be patent to everybody who reads the book that had that couple had even one child there boredom would not have existed. As it is, we are left to wonder whether there boredom was ever overcome.

The Daily Mail, March 13, 1924

The Forge

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To be of an unsettled and discontented disposition is an affliction which is apparent more to the persons observing than to those who are thus burdened, and it takes a great deal to persuade the afflicted ones that contentment is great gain. This would appear to be the model of Radclyffe Hall’s book, styled “The Forge.” The two leading characters in the story never

seem to settle on one thing or one place, and in the course of their wanderings they are made to look at times a bit ridiculous. There are some clever touches in the novel, if it may be called such, and the reader will no doubt find food for advantageous reflections on the virtue of contentment.

The Forge shows that she has considerable knowledge of human nature allied to the power of enlivening the commonplace into a story of unusual interest. Added to this, her sense of fun is really delicious. We defy anyone

who has ever been abroad to read the account of Hilary’s travelling experiences with Susan and her maid without to the most intense enjoyment.

MEN AND THINGS

Astronomer at Large,” by A. G. Thornton, have each their audacities and ironic gleams, they both have a story to tell, and tell it well, with the added merit of fresh and delightful humour. “The Red House Mystery,” by Victor Bridges, besides a clever plot, has a literary touch and a sense of values which lifts it from the ruck of detective fiction. Lastly, “The Inscrutable Secretary,” by Joan Cowdray, a writer new to me, has some brilliant characterisation, a charming love story, and is in a word a “find.”

A LONDON LETTER

light reading A great desire to see the daffodils in the Park and the first powdery covering of the green on the trees, with a misplaced confidence in the power of the sun to temper the keen east wind, ended as might have been expected, in a touch of “flue” and plenty of opportunity to do some light reading. I was lucky in my selection, for with the exception of Radcliffe [sic] Hall’s “The Forge,” which I found very dull, my box of books were all prizes. “The Unseemly Adventure,” by Straus, and “An

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The Courier, May 1, 1924

The Field, April 24, 1924

Stapleford & Sandiacre News, March 29, 1924

The Unlit Lamp

RADCLYFFE HALL, THE UNLIT LAMP (1924)

. . . while we were on holiday at Lynton in North Devon . . . John made the most important decision of her life. We were staying, as on former occasions, at the Lynton Cottage Hotel and one evening, while we were at dinner, sitting at the end of the long room, we watched a couple of fellow guests making their way to their table: a small, wizened old lady and an elderly woman who was quite obviously her maiden daughter. The latter was carrying a shawl and a footwarmer and clutched a bottle of medicine. She fussed for several minutes round the old lady, putting the footwarmer under her feet, the shawl round her shoulders and inquiring if she felt warm enough and not too warm before she herself attempted to sit down. And John said to me in an undertone: ‘Isn’t it ghastly to see these unmarried daughters who are just unpaid servants and the old people sucking the very life out of them like octopi!’ And then as suddenly: ‘I shall write it. I shall write Heinemann’s book for him and I shall call it Octopi.’ And so she began her first novel: it was only on the eve of publication that, at my suggestion, the tide became The Unlit Lamp. It took her two years to write it, for from the very beginning she was not a regular worker. Never for her the steady output, at fixed hours, of so many words a day. . . .

Una Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

The trouble with Elizabeth Rodney was that her passionate concern for the happiness of her pupil, Joan Ogden was fundamentally an even more passionate concern for her unhappiness. If Joan’s mother devoured and frustrated her, Elizabeth devoured her no less, and the result was failure for both their lives. The book may not hold water at all the corners (e.g.

Joan’s curious approach to medical study), but it is well worth reading, if only for its power of arousing obstinate questionings its ironical portrai-

ture is often excellent, particularly the snobbish mother, with her absurd yet pathetic cult of her own family. The British form of ancestor worship has seldom been more neatly handled than it has been by Miss Radclyffe Hall in “The Unlit Lamp”, in which the characterisation is everywhere more convincingly presented than the problem it propounds.

Illustrated London News, October 18, 1924

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The Unlit Lamp

Joan Ogden and her sister Milly came of a “service” family stranded on halfpay in a dull seaside town. Their mother was eaten up with family pride, their father (dying of heart disease) an irascible old soldier, whose domestic tyranny does not endear him to the reader. Both girls wanted to get out and make a career. Milly, the musician, almost succeeded; Joan, the possible woman of science did not succeed at all, and her last state is de-

pressing. But if the story is unhappy, it does not lack interest, and even fascination. The characters live, and are well set on the scene. Perhaps the book is rather too much of a tract on a subject already a trifle overdone – parental repression of the aspiring young; but for all that, “The Unlit Lamp” is a notable parable of wasted talent.

Miss Radclyffe Hall, the author of “The Unlit Lamp” has set herself a stern purpose, and has carried it out with unflinching courage. The purpose is to reveal the folly of self-sacrifice when the object of the sacrifice is unworthy.

The heroine, a brilliant girl with a career before her, has a selfish, unscrupulous, and cunning mother who employs all manner of craft and deceit to keep the girl in servitude. Again and again the girl strives to break away; but the mother, by pretence of weakness or illness or whatnot, succeeds in holding the unhappy daughter as a

mere abject minister to her indolence and selfishness. It is a painful story, crude in places, and dismal in its climax; but it has passion and sincerity, and the author’s aim – to be aware of the sin of “the unlit lamp” and not to be duped into stifling one’s personality – is enforced with a power that one recognises and admires. This book gets very near indeed to the inner realities of life.

The Sketch, October 29, 1924

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, October 2, 1924

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“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost Is – the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.”

From this Browning tag comes the inspiration for the title of “The Unlit Lamp,” by Radclyffe Hall. It is a novel which leaves the reader ineffably sad; it is the record of a human tragedy.

Joan Ogden, as we get to know her, is a girl of exceeding promise. A Cambridge course, a degree in medicine, and the world at her feet – all these things ought to be her right if she can only break off the family shackles which bind her. But the shackles prove stronger than she is. They are represented to begin with by a domineering father; on his death they are taken up by a tuberculous sister; finally the ten-

tacles are those of a hypochondriac mother. The cumulative effect is a misuse of potential talent. “The Unlit Lamp” is a masterly piece of introspective writing. The reader knows Joan from the age of 12 to the age of 43 or thereabouts, and every thought is laid bare – her ambitions, her doubts and then her surrender. There is a moral as well as a story in “The Unlit Lamp.” It is one which selfish parents will miss, but it is really intended for them.

Since Thackeray somewhat audaciously wrote his famous novel without a hero, there have been many stories in which mere man has been treated with but scant attention, making only a casual appearance. The latest of these is “The Unlit Lamp,” a masterly study of feminine characteristics, the atmosphere of which is wholly feminine, written with pitiless power and unerring psychological insight. It is a compelling novel off the beaten track, in which the subject – whether tradition and environment may be allowed to rob life of its highest fulfilment – is profoundly and adequately treated.

Joan Ogden, steeped in the traditions of family fealty, dreams of a position in life which her ambition and fine intellectual gifts could place within her

grasp; yet she is predestined to be a martyr to a dominating father and sister, and, more enslaving than the rest, to a selfish and jealous mother.

Mrs Ogden was unhappily married, and the love and sympathy she failed to receive from her husband, she strove to drain from Joan. Continually she is parading imaginary illnesses, incapacity, hunger for self-pity and affection, and protesting love for Joan.

The latter’s feelings are continually worked upon until renunciation and supreme self-sacrifice remained the guiding motives of her barren life Joan’s friend and governess, Elizabeth Rodney, realises that Mrs Ogden is a vampire who will drain her daughter dry; and she educates and influ-

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Edinburgh Evening News, October 3, 1924

The Unlit Lamp

ences Joan to fight the barriers of prejudice and environment.

She decides Joan must go to Cambridge, and later live with her in London, but the moment of giving is continually put off, Joan’s instinct of selfsacrifice making the move impossible.

So she fails to get the better of her environment and remains that pathetic unconsidered trifle of humanity an old woman, the best of whose life has been dissipated in self-sacrificing service to a worthless object.

Miss Hall is dauntless in painting the traits of her characters. She writes with dignity and beauty of style, while a vibrating sense of reality sets the story apart from the usual run of novels. Too serious for humour, the book, whose tragic ending has the note of the inevitable, may not be a popular success, but it is, nevertheless, an admirable piece of work.

This is a “novel with a purpose” with a vengeance! It’s theme is the selfish mother and the self-sacrificing daughter. Ought parents to demand the lifelong service of their children? Ought age to tyrannise ever youth and weakness over strength? Is it the duty of youth to renounce its ambitions and content itself with obedience to parents? Such are the burning questions discussed by Mr [sic] Radclyffe Hall in this excellent book. He [sic] is in no doubt as to the answer, and proclaims it frequently, with the fervour and moral indignation of a prophet. “How long is it to go on, this preying of the weak on the strong, the old on the young; this hideous, unnatural injustice that one sees all around one, this incredibly wicked thing that tradition sanctifies? . . . I tell you, Joan, the sin

of it lies at the door of that old woman up there in Lynton: that mild, always ailing, cruelly gentle creature who’s taken everything and given nothing and battened you year by year. She’s like an octopus who’s drained you dry.” But even apart from its dominating theme – to which there are more sides than the author presents – this is a book well worth reading. Joan Ogden, his heroine, is a magnificent character, well and consistently depicted throughout. The testy old Indian colonel, the weak and whining mother, the wax-doll second daughter, the great-hearted and strong-willed governess – all are drawn to the life. A really first-class novel.

Aberdeen Press and Journal, October 7, 1924

Western Daily Press, October 23, 1924

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Joan Ogden in “The Unlit Lamp,” by Radcliffe [sic] Hall (Cassell 7s 6d), was a pioneer who got left behind. A girl of intellect and culture she longed to break away from the petty little seaside town where she lived and go to Cambridge and London, but a sense of duty kept her chained to a selfish and exacting mother. An all-important friendship with her governess takes, with Joan, the place of a love affair,

and governess and mother struggle for first place in the girl’s life. “The Unlit Lamp” is not only a penetrating and sympathetic study of the three women but also a plea for the rights of the young to the shaping of their own lives.

This long novel, though we would not deny that it contains character studies which are careful and discriminating, may not unfairly be described as the biography from girlhood of a thoroughly morbid self-centred single woman, who makes a complete failure of her life. Joan Ogden’s harsh and bullying father clears out of the world fairly early in the story; but he leaves a tearful and depressing widow, who does much to ruin Joan’s life. Even in middle-age Joan might, if she liked, have made a very prosperous and happy marriage; and save that the author seems to want to keep her mis-

erable, we hardly know why she did not. She had one excessively devoted almost unwholesome woman friendship, which on the whole brought her more sorrow than happiness. All this does not promise a lively time for the reader, who will also not infrequently find the padding out of the tale extremely tedious. One longs for Joan to do something sensible and interesting, and it requires a determined effort to keep going to the end.

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Westminster Gazette, October 2, 1924

Times Literary Supplement, October 23, 1924

The Unlit Lamp

STRONG TALE OF THWARTED AMBITIONS No one would call this a pleasant book, but it is impossible to deny its poignancy and its power. Here we have painted with almost merciless touch the picture of a human soul struggling against a hopeless and exasperating environment. It seems cruel and unjust that such cases should be, and yet they exist, no doubt in vast numbers, and in the story before us Radclyffe Hall has turned the searchlight upon Joan Ogden as an example of the rest.

Every reader of “The Unlit Lamp” will sympathise with Joan and all that she stands for. This girl might have achieved great things, and we know that she struggled hard. But where she makes a step forward some unseen Power, cruel, relentless, seems to thrust out invisible fingers to force her back.

Joan Ogden and her younger sister Emily begin life badly, through no fault of their own. Why? Heredity in the shape of a weak mother and an exacting father hardly gave either of the girls a fair chance. Why? Environment treats them not much better than heredity, and again one asks Why? These questions have been put over and over again, and again and again attempts have been made to answer them. Some find an adequate response in the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation, but at best they hold out cold comfort, and no admission of their truth would suffice to deliver these Ogden girls from the meshes in which they are entangled.

Unjust, says some reader. So Joan Ogden thought and cried out a thousand times, for as the author puts it, “it was what she considered injustice that rose the devil in Joan,” even as a child, “when the cat had been turned out to fend for itself during the summer holidays, when a servant had been dismissed at a moment’s notice for some trifling misdemeanour, these and suchlike incidents, which were fortunately of rare occurrence, had been known to produce in Joan the mood that her mother almost feared. Then it was that Joan had spoken her mind,” as we find her speaking it again and again in this powerful novel; but to what purpose? Joan’s father, the old Indian colonel is well drawn – he is a little bulky and a tyrant, and his wife is a poor weak thing, a hopeless “dish cloth” of a woman, one of the exasperatingly helpless type. Amidst perpetual squabbles it was the fate of Joan and Emily to make their early acquaintance with the fact of life.

The author traces the career of Joan and of Emily and of their teacher and friend Elizabeth Rodney. Each of them has a hard row to hoe; perhaps Elizabeth comes off the best of the three, yet she marries a man who she makes no pretence of loving. Emily, caught in a vulgar entanglement, is saved from its consequences by the opening up of a new world to her in the pursuit of music. There is some prospect of success, even fame, with the violin, but phthisis intervenes, and the gates close upon Emily. Joan, in her loyalty to her mother, now widowed and more helpless than ever,

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sees her own chances ebbing away with equal certainty and cruelty; till as an elderly woman, after her mother’s departure, she ends her days in a post as nurse to an imbecile. It is all very sad, and at times almost morbid, but there are many subsidiary characters in the book, all of them carefully

worked out. One can unfeignedly congratulate the author of “The Unlit Lamp” on the production of a novel of power and pathos, and one that is certain to set its readers thinking.

Western Mail, September 9, 1924

THE RIGHTS OF THE YOUNG Joan Ogden in “The Unlit Lamp,” by Radclyffe Hall was a pioneer who got left behind. A girl of intellect and culture she longed to break away from the petty little seaside town where she lived and go to Cambridge and London, but a sense of duty kept her chained to a selfish and an exacting mother and all-important friendship with her governess takes, with Joan, the place of a love affair, and gover-

ness and mother struggle for first place in the girl’s life. “The Unlit Lamp” is not only a penetrating and sympathetic study of the three women but also a plea for the rights of the young to the shaping of their own lives.

Miss Radclyffe Hall’s new novel, The Unlit Lamp is a distinguished piece of work. There are women one knows, who are not meant for marriage, and Joan Ogden is one of these. The one big romance of her life is her devotion to another woman, but between them there is for ever standing the slightly sinister figure of Joan’s mother. Mrs Ogden is one of those selfish mothers who demand all and give nothing. Had Joan been permitted to take up the career for which she was suited, the

career which Elizabeth was so keen to arrange for her, all might have been well. But on two occasions the mother calls, neither time in vain, and the lamp of Joan’s happiness remains unlit.

It is a tragic story, but it’s note is not always sombre. Jones home life is sketched in with unusual power and considerable humour. Mrs Ogden herself rouses you to fury, which means to say that there is no exaggeration in her portrait. As for Joan herself, you can

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Westminster Gazette, October 2, 1924

The Unlit Lamp

but be sorry. She might have done so much, and she does nothing; at the end she is nursing an old man with the mind of a child of six. She is not, of course, the ordinary woman, but she belongs to a not uncommon type. In Miss Hall’s hands she never loses your

sympathy. The book has been written with great care, and will repay detailed reading.

LADIES’ KENNEL ASSOCIATION NOTES

as is so cleverly depicted in the novel.

The story is a sad one, but this is unavoidable, for Joan was a pioneer and the pathway of the pioneer is always beset with thorns; besides, with her capacity for self-sacrifice, one doubts if she could ever have had a really happy life, even had she carried out her ambition and embarked on what must have been a successful career. Her greatest friend, Elizabeth, did not seem to expect happiness for her. “If Joan can’t be happy, then she has a right to make her own unhappiness; it’s a thousand times better to be unhappy in your own way than to be happy in someone else’s.” A truism, this, most happily expressed. My only regret is that Miss Radclyffe Hall has no “doggy” character like the dear dachshund in “The Forge.”

Members who, like myself, derived much enjoyment from Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel, “The Forge,” will be delighted to learn that Messrs. Cassel, Ltd have recently published another novel from her pen, “The Unlit Lamp.”

Although this book may not appeal to such a wide public as “The Forge,” for it is essentially a “woman’s book,” its popularity is already assured, for the authoress has an almost uncanny gift of characterisation; and Joan, the long-suffering heroine, and her mother (who resembles the “Mollusc” of the well-known play) exist as living individuals in the life surroundings of most of us. Indeed in my own generation (the early Victorian) one would hardly find a family without its “Mrs Ogden,” though perhaps they did not always reduce selfishness to a fine art,

The Bystander, October 15, 1924

The Tatler, Jan 21, 1925

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High Collars & Monocles

“The Unlit Lamp,” by M. Radcliffe [sic] Hall, is the story of a girl born with more than the average amount of cleverness, but whose potentialities are destroyed by her unborn passion for self-sacrifice and by the selfishness of her own mother. The chances of life made Joan Ogden the prey of a mild, always ailing, cruelly gentle mother, who took everything and gave nothing, who battened on her daughter year by year who drained her drive. It was not that Joan did not struggle, it was not that her governess, Elizabeth, did not help her in the struggle, nor that Richard, who was in love with Joan, did not do his best for her. Nor was there any doubt what she wanted to be, she was perfectly sure her vocation was to be a doctor, but the instinct to selfsacrifice is stronger in her than her

affections and her judgement will not allow her to break the chain that binds her to her mother. It is a useless sacrifice because the object of the sacrifice is worthless. Mrs Ogden is a vampire that sucks her daughter dry, until at forty-three Joan is old in body and mind, her skin is shrivelled and her mind so atrophied that she cannot grasp big things; give it a piece of work and it flags immediately. Her nerves are unreliable and her body a mass of small ailments. The character of Mrs Ogden, the best thing in the book, makes painful reading, because it is such an accurate picture of too many mothers.

The tragedy of a brilliantly gifted girl who is impelled by force of circumstances and temperament to sacrifice her career to the exacting love of a selfishly affectionate mother. She finds herself “left” at forty-five, with nothing better available than the post of nurse to an imbecile old dotard. This pitiful tragedy is worked out with ruthless consistency to its ruthless conclusion.

Joan, being what she was, could not do otherwise than she did. It is a poignant instance of that inevitability which, as the old Greek dramatists knew, is always inherent in the tragic as distinct from the merely pathetic. The author is to be congratulated on a really fine piece of work.

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‘Portia’, Hull Daily Mail, October 16, 1924

Truth, October 15, 1924

The Unlit Lamp

Several people have written to say that they do not agree with me in what I said last time about the book “The Unlit Lamp.” They feel strongly that a woman’s place is by her mother’s side, and that her first duty is to her mother. Well, we must agree to differ. No nice daughter forgets her mother, I’ll agree. But no nice mother forgets that it is a daughter’s first duty to light her own lamp. Strange to say, a “mere man” has written to say he agrees with every word of my comment, only I have made a mistake in thinking that a woman wrote the book. “Radcliffe [sic] Hall is a man” says he. He says he reads my article every week and he wishes there was someone writing setting forth the male’s point of view, “So well as you put the female side.”

Bless him! There are many pages every night in the “Mail” setting forth the male point of view, but I advise him to

write to the Editor, who is always open to receive talent. Now after that, I am sorry to disillusion his mind about Radclyffe Hall. Miss Radcliffe Hall is a woman; one of a marked personality and much versatility! Her mother was an American, and Miss Radcliffe Hall has devoted her leisure to travelling in the United States, the Near East and elsewhere. She has been writing poetry from the age of three – her mother dated her first effusion – and she has published five books of verse. Her poems have all been composed at the piano and her rhythm fitted by her to charming themes. Her first novel was “The Forge,” which appeared early this year.

The Unlit Lamp, by Radclyffe Hall is one of those gloomy yet powerful stories which centre around the selfsacrifice of a child for its parent. Joan Ogden is a lovable girl, full of high spirit, pride, and resolution, yet she falls victim to the selfishness of her mother, who, making an appeal to her better nature, induces her to abandon

all hopes of a career and even of marriage in order to minister to her petty illnesses and domestic wants. When release from this maternal bondage eventually comes it is too late, and Joan spends the rest of her life in sterile spinsterhood.

‘Portia’, Hull Daily Mail, October 23, 1924

The Scotsman, December 1, 1924

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High Collars & Monocles

A NOTABLE NOVEL Mr [sic] Radclyffe Hall has in this novel given a powerful presentation of the ugly and the pressing side of selfsacrifice. The life of Joan Ogden, the eldest of Colonel and Mrs Ogden’s two daughters, was one long, dreary course of suppression of natural instincts, laudable ambitions, and healthy affections for the sake of her parents and her sister. Her father was a selfish, bad-tempered household tyrant, but her mother was really Joan’s worst enemy. She was an egotist of the most objectionable type, weak, obstinate, and incurably parasitic, yet in her very feebleness appealing to the protective instinct which was so strong in her daughter. Chance upon chance of escaping from the deadening domestic environment of the shabby genteel house in the dull seaside town and living her own life was rejected by Joan, often after a hard struggle, owing to Mrs Ogden’s opposition, which

This is an exceedingly clever study of the ethics of self-sacrifice – a dissection of the problem of one life preying on another, husband on wife, mother on child, sickness on health, friend on friend – a self-sacrifice forced, as it were, on the victim, who all the while bitterly resents her fate, and makes hopeless struggles to be free, until at last a lethargy of body and mind sets in, which can find a sort of pale comfort in fussy routine. Mark Rutherford speaks, in his “Revolution in Tanner’s 42

was as much passive as active. And, when the death of the tyrant at last set the poor woman free – she was well over forty – she was too weary and disheartened, even if she had not been too old, to think either of marriage or of a profession, and was glad to act on the suggestion of a relative that she should take charge of an elderly imbecile at a salary of a hundred pounds a year. It is a sad story, but only too true in its pitiless delineation of a type of character more abundantly represented all over the world than is pleasant to contemplate. Joan, parents, her sister Milly and her friend Elizabeth, who try so hard to break her chains, but fail to do so, are all admirably drawn, and some of the minor personages are endowed with strong individuality. “The Unlit Lamp” is one of the most notable novels of the year.

Northern Whig, November 22, 1924

Lane,” of the sufferings of those unhappy souls who are martyred, not for any glorious cause – such have their reward – but for no cause at all; and so it is with Joan Ogden – for after all, her jealous, weak mother, the selfwilled sister, the friend who strives to draw her away, would all have been infinitely better in the long run, both morally and mentally, had they been obliged to shoulder their own burdens.

The kind of exclusive, jealous love portrayed is such that, even as a child,

The Unlit Lamp

Joan feels that “one could not love more than one person at a time, at least, Joan was sure that she could not.

There’s one side of me that rages at the injustice of everything, and just wants to grab at everything for itself; but there’s another side that simply can’t inflict pain, because it hurts itself so much in doing it – I can’t bear to hurt things, especially things that seem to lean on me.” And so the ivy strangles the oak, and the useless tragedy takes place! The “making nothing of life” fills with bitterness and awful emptiness the thwarted victim.

The little watering-place, in which the Ogdens live, with its retired Colonels and Admirals, is a place, as the hero describes it, where you get “bottled and all cramped up and foggy,” and he tries to make Joan see “that it is a sin to let yourself get drained by anyone; that that isn’t the sort of thing God gave us our brains for, it wasn’t why He made us individuals.” But it is in vain that lover and friends try to break the shackles, both find it hopeless in the long run – Joan cannot be free to go forward. She becomes dully methodical – dead. The minor charac-

ters are lifelike and so is their setting, too lifelike to be altogether satisfactory, for to shut the book and say “yes – this is life” is only partially true. There is a high devotion inspired by genuine selfless love, which does not ruin those to whom it is given – there is selfsacrifice which is necessary and Christlike, an offering poured forth with cheerful alacrity, which enriches giver and receiver; after all, “The Unlit Lamp” is of the “frustrate ghost.” the glowing, warming flame, burning itself out perhaps in its life’s task, belongs to those whose path is as a shining light – the just, who shall endure for ever.

It is neither just, nor wise, nor truly loving for the “weak to pray on the strong, the old on the young, the sick on the healthy, like an octopus,” as Joan’s lover, Richard, says in his final outburst – and yet how often we see it!

Read “The Unlit Lamp,” enjoy the masterly treatment of the subject, and search your heart to see if you, too, are “bottling” any young and wild creature for your own ends, or are being “bottled”!

THE UNLIT LAMP: MOTHERS WHO ACT AS VAMPIRES

largely on an ancestral tradition, and too proud to keep the common touch, who is urged by her own feelings and inclination and by the exhortation of her friend, Elizabeth Rodney, to break away from the narrowness and pettiness of the cramped life of the little town and make for herself a career of

Truth is stranger than fiction but it is not often that it is as interesting. We feel sure that this book is written around the actual episodes of a life. It is the heart-breaking story of a woman, Joan Ogden, born to a family living

J.M.T., Vote, November 14, 1924

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usefulness in the world, and incidentally to work out her own salvation.

A Gentle Vampire.

But her efforts are always frustrated by her mother, that cruel, selfish, gentle creature, who, unloved by her husband, is determined to prey upon the filial emotions of her favourite daughter, and does, vampire-like, suck the life-urge from the spirit of her dutiful child. For Joan cannot leave her mother, pathetic creature as the latter is, despite her octopus-like qualities. Offers of marriage she puts on one side; help to escape from her spiritual and mental confinement she rejects. As a foil for the energetic forceful Joan is the pretty, vivacious sister Milly, who takes what life sends and selfishly satisfies her passions and sensual requirements, and dies of Phthisis at twenty-one, having had a fuller life than Joan can ever have.

For the Sake of a Home.

Ultimately her lover gives up asking poor Joan to marry him; Elizabeth gives up her efforts and marries and goes to Africa, the mother dies at last, and Joan is left at forty-three, her bobbed hair turning grey, looking like

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“a pioneer left behind,” and we leave her, without income, complacently taking on the care of an imbecile relative for the sake of a home. The book consists essentially of studies of the characters of four women, the mother, Joan, Milly, and Elizabeth Rodney. It is written fluently, and as a story is interesting enough, if of no outstanding merits. Somehow we feel that the real Joan is a trifle more successful than the one in the book. If the latter had only given it all up, even at fortythree, she might have seen that career opening up before her. As it is, her whole history is the tragedy of a promising life strangled for the want of a little healthy selfishness on her part.

There must be many such women as Joan Ogden, a type in which all personal desire, all ambition, all selfexpression is subdued and crushed by an environment and the selfish demands of others, operating on the one weak spot in the make up of the character of the type – that is, on their insane pursuit of self-sacrifice.

The author has drawn the picture well and has produced a book well worth reading.

H.S. Carter, The Leeds Mercury, December 8, 1924

The Unlit Lamp

RADCLYFFE HALL, A SATURDAY LIFE (1925) According to an Eastern tradition, the origin of which is lost in antiquity, there are certain spirits which reincarnate seven times only on earth. The seventh reincarnation of such a spirit, according to Ms Hall, is known in the West as “The Saturday Life.” People who are living a Saturday life are said to have no new experiences, but to pass their existence in a rehearsal of experiences previously gained. They are said to exhibit remarkable talent for a number of different things; but since they have many memories to revive they can never concentrate for long on one. A girl with such a temperament is Sidonia Shore, the heroine of this unusual and original novel. By turns she shows great aptitude for Greek dancing, drawing, music, sculpture and singing, throwing her whole

soul into them while the spell lasts, but suddenly and unexpectedly, as she is about to reach the goal of her ambition she loses interest, and the gift passes from her, leaving her in a state of deepest depression. Her soul does not fulfil its craving for expression until she falls in love and is happily married. The characters of this story are drawn with a wonderful delicacy of perception; one pities Sidonia’s mother continually living in the past with her husband’s collection of scarabs, and develops an admiration for the strong, capable Frances, Sidonia’s companion, who so tactfully restrains the girl’s strange nature.

That Miss Radclyffe Hall has the courage to face problems and to work them out to the end was proved by “The Unlit Lamp,” and it is disappointing to see her spending herself on such an unambitious work as “The Saturday Life” (Arrowsmith, 7s 6d), her latest novel. There are a great many – perhaps too many – possibilities in the story of a girl who has talent for all the

arts, but cannot concentrate on one for long, and in treating the subject flippantly Miss Radclyffe Hall has avoided some obvious pitfalls. The fact that all her characters are freaks or caricatures adds to the humour rather than the merit of the book.

Aberdeen Press and Journal, April 14, 1925

Westminster Gazette, June 18, 1925

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A Saturday Life

Sidonia Shore, around whose early career this very clever and original story revolves, is going through her seventh reincarnation or “Saturday life;” in which she reproduces, successively, her six previous existences in a condensed form. Sidonia’s vagaries are extremely amusing, but the real artistic value of the book lies in the descriptions of her various milieus, each of which is a little masterpiece.

Frances, the elderly looker-on deserves a volume to herself; while the Ferrari family are such a slight caricature of a certain type of English musical family that one suspects portraiture. Altogether an outstanding novel of marked originality and quite unusual merit. If it sells as well as it reads, it will be one of the popular successes of the year.

Truth, May 6, 1925

Sidonia looked like being a genius.

First, at seven years of age, she had the dancing impulse and insisted on dancing in complete undress. Dancing lessons failed to develop her as a genius in that line, however. Then she discovered a similar impulse for music, but that proved no thoroughfare, too.

Then it was clay modelling, and then again singing, and the story was the same each time. We are not sure of the order in which these impulses or suggestions of genius manifested themselves, but that does not matter. Anyway, eventually Sidonia marries a very ordinary young man and has a baby, and the moral of the book seems to be that the surest manifestation of genius in a young woman is to have a baby.

Frankly, we see nothing convincing in

Sidonia, and little that is convincing in her mother or in Frances. Think of a child of seven talking like this: “it’s a lie! It’s a beastly lie! It’s a lie! I’m not a stupid idiot like that last summer! I’m not what you’d call a bore! I’m clever! I dance divinely, I tell you! . . . Of course, I don’t obey, because I do know better. What she wants me to do is ugly! Ugly and stupid, stupid and ugly! She’s a damned stupid old geezer!” And to her mother and Frances, too! Some years later Sidonia declares, “I can’t help myself.” Perhaps if she had been soundly smacked when she talked so rudely at seven years of age she might have learned to “help herself” more quickly than she did!

Western Mail, May 14, 1925

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Sidonia, Miss Radclyffe Hall’s new heroine, is scarcely so convincing or so true to life as her Joan of The Unlit Lamp, the woman who never really lived. Sidonia lives too intensely. She is a brilliant child. At first it is dancing that occupies all her energy. Then it is music on which all her interests become focused. She becomes a wonderful pianist. Then she wearies of music in its turn, and takes up sculpture instead. She wins a travelling scholarship, and goes to pursue this art in Florence. There her interest in sculpture suddenly deserts her. She is induced to take lessons in singing. Finally, she forsakes this last-mentioned art

in favour of marriage, and her story breaks off, most disappointingly, just when she has achieved motherhood. It is scarcely credible that the restless, vacillating Sidonia has come to anchor at last. Sidonia is an interesting creature, but hardly convincing; she achieves success with too much facility in too many different arts. The novel draws its unusual title,from a passage which Frances, Sidonia’s mature and understanding friend, discovered in a treatise dealing with Eastern theories on reincarnation.

[The book’s title is intriguing but] it is safe to say that once you turn over the first few pages to find out what it all means you will continue onto the end with the greatest enjoyment. For the book is a joyously whimsical affair with a very curious young lady for a heroine, and two adorable old ladies for her mentors. Sidonia, indeed, is a lovable creature, whether she be dancing naked (fortunately she’s only seven at the time) in her mother’s drawing room, playing the piano like a (fifteenyear-old) goddess, using clay like a youthful magician, or singing with all the technique of a prima-donna. The trouble is that she is one of those unfortunate beings who are fated to disappoint their teachers.

What is to be done, you wonder, with so wayward a genius? Old Frances, with her masculine clothes and her solid good sense, does not know. Poor Lady Shore, Sidonia’s mother, has not an idea outside her Egyptian studies. But it does sometimes happen, even in real life, that the right man comes along and works wonders, and so Miss Hall is enabled to round off her story in a particularly charming way. The book makes very good reading, and I, for one, hope that we may have a little more of old Frances, who certainly deserves a whole book to herself.

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The Scotsman, June 1, 1925

The Bystander, June 10, 1925

A Saturday Life

Sidonia Shore in A SATURDAY LIFE by Radclyffe Hall (Arrowsmith 7s 6d net), after a tempestuous girlhood in which sparks of genius seem to light upon her from some far-off elfland, flare up, and die away, should never — indeed could never — have quite lost her other-worldly secret. Infant prodigies, such as Sidonia promised to be both in her music and in her sculpture, do sometimes fade into the light of common day. But that she should wholly lose her divine fire and her passion for self-expression and become the docile wife of a painfully priggish country gentleman, duly and delightedly presenting him with a son and heir, is tragic, and as incredible as it is tragic. In the last eighty-odd pages indeed the magic vanishes not only out of Sidonia’s life but out of the book.

She might have been wafted away, like Marie Rose — caught back perhaps to her first incarnation in some vision of the ancient Greece that had fascinated her childhood, or of the older Egyptian world which absorbed the thoughts of her dreamy, amiable mother.

If this is all too fanciful Miss Radclyffe Hall has only herself to blame for suggesting it so skilfully. Perhaps she only wants to tell us the old story of a wayward, impulsive, clever girl tamed to play the part of conventional wife and mother. But in any case the reader may, before he reaches the eighty closing pages, abandon himself to the enjoyment of finely cut characters with excellent dialogue and de-

scriptions of artistic life. Besides Sidonia's puzzled mother, much more interested in Amenhotep the First and the famous Shore collection of scarabs than in her amazing daughter, there are two characters who dominate the story — Sidonia herself and Frances Reide. Frances, a downright mannish spinster, scanning the world through her tortoiseshell monocle, had undertaken the rôle of Lady Shore's guardian angel and indispensable confidante.

She became as indispensable to Sidonia, whom her shrewd, outspoken criticising helped to keep sane. But it was she who sprang upon Sidonia, out of an old book she picked up in Florence, the idea of a “Saturday Life” — the old Eastern tradition that certain rare spirits incarnate seven times only on earth; the seventh incarnation bringing no new experiences but spent in a last rehearsal of experiences previously gained. These spirits show talent for a number of things, but cannot concentrate for long on one. Sidonia saw the point at once — “it would explain me,’ she said solemnly . . . ‘Nothing that's happened would be my fault.”

Frances said that was all rubbish; and on the last page when Sidonia announced that she would always call her baby “Saturday,” Frances grunted and said “All the same I'd call him Monday, I think if, I were you.”

Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 1925

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RADCLYFFE HALL, ADAM'S BREED (1926) If I went into all her publishing vicissitudes I might become libellous as well as boring. It suffices to say that The Unlit Lamp was published by Cassell in 1924 and established her reputation and that after she had put paid to Arrowsmith with A Saturday Life, she was able in 1926 to give Newman Flower Adam’s Breed.

The first I heard of it was at the Pall Mall restaurant, which was at that time rather a favourite haunt of ours. In the middle of a pleasant tête-à-tête luncheon John became abstracted and inattentive. Her eye was following our obsequious waiter and presently she said to me with quiet decision, ‘I am going to write the life of a waiter who becomes so utterly sick of handling food that he practically lets himself die of starvation.’ Newman Flower wrote of Adam’s Breed that it was the finest book that had been submitted to him in twenty years, that he was proud to publish it but did not expect it to sell. It won John the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the American Eichelberger gold medal. It sold twenty-seven thousand copies in the first three weeks and is still selling steadily after nineteen years. It is one of the books that has come to stay. It was translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian and I cannot remember what other languages. Though it criticized the Italians they loved it dearly and accepted the criticism as just. . . . Her final exploit in regard to Adam’s Breed she performed without me under the escort of Dr. Brontë, the pathologist. He took her to visit a public mortuary so that she could verify details of procedure and it was not until at least three weeks had elapsed that she revealed to me that its only occupant had been a baby recently dead of diphtheria! . . . Adam’s Breed was another case of an altered title and here again Lynton comes into the picture. We were once more staying at the Cottage Hotel when Newman Flower put through a trunk call; he had been considering the original title: Food, and had made up his mind that he could not digest it. John was too agitated to grasp what he said, but I hung on until I heard him protesting that with such a tide the book would be still-born. . . . ‘It’s bound to be mistaken for a cookery book’, he wailed. Time was short and a title had to be found, and once more I displayed my solitary talent. Firmly rejecting John’s frenzied suggestions, I ransacked the local Smith’s for sources of inspiration and ended by finding what we required in Kipling’s Tomlinson: ‘I’m all ’oer-sib to Adam’s Breed that I should mock your pain.’ And what is more I still think it a most excellent title! . . . . And since I am busy just here blowing my own trumpet, let me add that I also christened . . . The Well of Loneliness, The Master of the House, and The Sixth Beatitude.

Una Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

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Adam’s Breed

“

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Women writers seem to be rather more than usual to the fore this year.

Already Miss Radclyffe Hall’s book, Adam’s Breed, is being discussed at every dinner-table, and spoken of by most good judges as being one of the

best novels, if not the novel, of the year, and a wonderful study of certain types of people and of human psychology.

THE BOOK OF THE WEEK

seek sustenance in the ample bosom of unappreciated Britain. . . .

This picture of life in foreign London is an unforgettable one, and the glimpses behind the scenes in a big restaurant, with the technicalities of service de luxe, and all the intricate business of attending to the prosaic alimentary part of our life, are interesting because they are new.

It is, perhaps, a pity that the author did not stick to them and not attempt to carry her characters to so many places and to so many situations. She seems at times to have lost her skilful hold of all the threads. One is left with the feeling of having viewed an overcrowded canvas, possibly because the end is drawn out and nebulous, possibly because of the length of the book and its heavy burden of trivial detail.

Nevertheless, this novel is very welcome as a sympathetic and gracefully written study of people whom everyone sees but very few know.

THE LONELY WAITER: A TALE OF LONDON’S “LITTLE” ITALY Miss Radclyffe Hall’s new novel is a tale of loneliness – the loneliness of the little foreign colony of Soho, set like a tiny island (albeit a very selfsufficing one) in the vast sea of London. This sense of loneliness pervades every page of a book that has been written with rare insight and a tender understanding. To us, as we read, Soho appears no longer as a squalid corner of dingy shops and rather flamboyant tawdriness, nor yet as an enchanted land where prosaic England may adventure in search of rosecoloured romance at little expense.

Rather is it shown as it really is – a busy hive of humble human beings, with loves is like ours, and hates like ours, and troubles and sufferings and little simple joys – and, unlike us, with a wistful longing for a homeland of sunshine that is, nevertheless, home, despite the poverty and the economic struggles that forced its children to

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The Sphere, June 5, 1926

Vaughan Vane, Gentlewoman & Modern Life, April 17, 1926

Adam’s Breed

Miss Radclyffe Hall must surely know her Soho inside out, else she could never have written this absolutely living story of Gian-Luca, grandson of Fabio and Teresa Boselli, who run a magasin de comestibles in Old Compton Street. The story is too long to attempt to recapitulate. Besides, the merit and interest of this remarkable

novel – for remarkable beyond a doubt it is – lies much less in the story than in the convincing reality of its characters and its atmosphere. It is a fine achievement, on which the author may be deservedly congratulated.

Miss Radclyffe Hall takes a rather newer view of Soho in her story ADAM’S BREED (Cassell, 7s. 6d.) than the ordinary novelist who is content to dine there, or, at most, to plot in a Soho cellar. Her hero is an Italian boy born and brought up in Old Compton Street, and his relatives and friends, vendors of pasta and oil, or restaurant keepers, all exiles from Italy, fill the rest of the scene. Her view is necessarily an exterior one, since she is not herself one of the Italian colony living in Soho; but she is observant and sympathetic, and if her characters are a trifle romantic, in the sense of having been met with before in fiction, they are presented in quite an interesting fashion. With Gian-Luca himself, the sensitive, distressed youth to whom the pain of life becomes unbearable, she is very successful. The reader not only grows fond of him, but suffers with him, and is thankful when he is granted a happy release in the New Forest.

There is, however, a lifetime of thirty-four years before that comes to Gian-Luca; and his experiences from infancy onward are set before the

reader very attractively. He is the child of sin; and his unlucky mother died at his birth, leaving him to the care of an implacable grandmother who denies herself the joy of loving him, and a grandfather who is his friend and companion. He goes to school, he plays, he thinks, but he seldom laughs; he makes friends with a good-natured librarian with whom he has wise talks; presently he becomes a waiter at the Capo di Monte Restaurant. He is unspoilt and a charming, and the padrona falls in love with him and he with her, but she gives way to her infatuation only for a single moment. His real career as a waiter is in the famous “Doric Restaurant,” of which the padrone and the clients are cleverly drawn. Meanwhile Gian-Luca’s mental development is rapid, and he thinks deeply about life. By the side of his personal history runs the fortune of his grandparents’ great shop the Casa Bocelli, where all sorts of Italian wares are manufactured and sold; and for a chapter or so the story moves to Italy at the time of the grape harvest, when Gian-Luca and his young wife Maddalena visit her family.

Truth, March 24, 1926

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But Gian-Luca is a prisoner; born of Adam’s breed, born in some measure a Saint Francis, he cannot endure city life or the sight of suffering that he cannot help; he is a man apart, unable to give himself even to Maddalena whom he loves. The study of his intense misery is moving. Fortunately Miss Hall knows that with such dejec-

tion come exquisite moments of relief, when the beauty of nature blots out the ugliness. But there is one final solution for such sensitive souls, and to Gian-Luca it comes easily and beautifully.

The palm of modern fiction might, with justification, be awarded to Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel “Adam’s Breed.”

At least, that is my conviction, and though I made three false starts ere I read the book in its entirety, that was not in any way due to the lack of appeal on the part of the book itself, but because my mind was not at the time receptive of the style in which it is written.

An unusual book this, both in its subject and in its ending. Miss Hall carries her readers through what might be termed the Latin quarter of London, here describing, in beautiful

lyrical passages, the inspirations and aspirations of the soul of a young Italian, there, with soul-searing and stark realism, depicting the struggles with adversity of this young man, whose birth was against him, whose relatives hated him, whose friends misunderstood him, and whose death, as described in the closing chapter, must have been a step into glorious freedom for one whose soul aspired far above his compatriots in Soho.

A human story, and well told.

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Times Literary Supplement, March 18, 1926

Readers’ Letters, Sunday Post, November 11, 1928

Adam’s Breed

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A LITERARY DINNER A “novel” dinner has been given in Soho. Miss Radclyffe Hall, author of “Adam’s Breed,” after lecturing to the Writers’ Literary Circle, found herself hurried off to Gatti’s. She was surprised at the preparations made. All the menus had been specially painted with quotations from the book, and

An old friend to many, but new to me, is “Adam’s Breed,” by Radclyffe Hall. A well-presented 3s. 6d. edition with a charming wrapper by Una Troubridge has blossomed out on the bookstalls here; every copy is belted with a tricolor band (a band that, one hopes, will console R. H. for the other) recalling the fact that the novel won the Femina Prize in 1926. I am hoping that this

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the meal – cooked by that master chef Oddenino himself – consisted entirely of dishes and wines mentioned in “Adam’s Breed.” The scene of the book is laid in Soho, and as the chief character is a waiter it will be seen there was plenty of scope for an epicurean meal.

Yorkshire Evening News, February 3, 1927

will be followed by new editions of “The Unlit Lamp” and “Saturday Life” which I have not read. “The Forge” is an old friend that I remember speaking of with due appreciation on this page.

‘Priscilla in Paris,’ The Tatler, February 27, 1929

Adam’s Breed

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To the lover of good books one of the most depressing tendencies of the day is the never-ending stream of novels published – presumably at a profit – which cannot be regarded as a permanent contribution to literature, which are bound, from their very nature, to perish soon after their birth. Thus it is a matter for rejoicing to read Miss Radclyffe Hall’s latest novel, “Adam’s Breed,” which shows fiction at its highest level.

The story tells of Gian Luca, the illegitimate son of an Italian girl who dies at her mother’s home in Old Compton Street in giving him birth.

Teresa, the girl’s mother – a wonderful character – is embittered by the shame and death of her only child, and repudiates the religion she has come to for so many years. Holding up the newborn baby before the image of the Virgin over the deathbed: – Take him (said Teresa). I have no use for him. He has stolen my life.

He has killed my child; and you let him do it . . . If you do exist then I give this thing to you – do as you like with it; play with it, crush it, as you crushed its mother over there.

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These words are the keynote of the story. Gian Luca is brought up by Teresa, who does not even pretend to love him, and spends his youth in the Italian colony in London, with its jealousies, its gossip, its avarice, yet with a certain noble kinship and mutual love.

He becomes a waiter, and a lover of Italian poetry; he is a perfect waiter, but at heart he is a songless bird and it hurts. In his loneliness he marries Maddalena, a splendid specimen of Italian womanhood, who loves him; but he does not love her – he takes without giving.

The war comes, and then a visit to Italy, Gian Luca in search of his own soul, for the tragedy of his life weighs heavily upon him. Finally nauseated by the cruelty of existence, he makes a final bid for self-realisation.

The story is one of rare beauty and strength, full of fine characterisation and dramatic realism, yet relieved by a distinctly subtle humour – the work of a poetess with a command of virile prose.

Aberdeen Press and Journal, March 15, 1926

Adam’s Breed

Most of those who read “Adam’s Breed” will agree that Miss Ratclyffe [sic] Hall thoroughly deserves the Femina prize, which has just been awarded to her for the most distinguished piece of imaginative literature written during the year.

Though Miss Hall herself was born at Bournemouth, her father was a well-known Yorkshire landowner, and the authoress has many family connections with the Ridings, which frequently feature in her poems. Liza Lehmann and Coleridge Taylor have often set Miss Hall’s verses to music,

though not everyone knows that she is the anonymous lyricist of the song, “The Blind Ploughman.”

Miss Hall’s appearance is as distinctive as her writing and her fair Eton crop, monocle and masculine suits always single her out for attention at the first nights she invariably attends. She is also a keen dancer, and with her friend, Una Lady Troubridge, is organising next week the first dance ever held at the famous Writers’ Club.

Sheffield Independent, April 28, 1927

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Adam’s Breed

The award of the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize has been made to Miss Radclyffe Hall for her popular novel of Soho, “Adam’s Breed,” whose chief character is a waiter.

The Femina prize is the only international reciprocal literary prize, and is awarded annually in France and England for the best work of fiction of the year. The final award to the English novel is made by the French Committee and vice versa, and both committees are composed of distinguished writers.

The three novels which were selected to go up to the French Commit-

tee were “Adam’s Breed”; “Lolly Willowes,” Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner’s book which raised so much discussion on witchcraft; and Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Informer.”

Miss Radclyffe Hall is an accomplished linguist, a great traveller, and an indefatigable first-nighter. Her flaxen Eton crop, monocle, and masculine style of dress make her a notable figure in any assembly.

“MONOCLED AUTHORESS”

had no Christmas gift which pleased me more,” said Ms Hall, discussing the latest award yesterday. “As I take my writing very seriously I am very gratified at this double token of appreciation.”

Miss Hall thought the novel was never at a more “important or hopeful stage,” than today. “The reason is simple,” she said, “for the modern novel is candid, fearless, and genuine. Writers today are not afraid to tackle any subject that they think requires tackling, either because they think it makes a very fine subject or for reasons of propaganda.”

Double Literary Honour for Miss Radclyffe Hall The unusual honour of winning in one year two of the most coveted literary prizes has fallen to Miss Radclyffe Hall, whose novel, “Adam’s Reed,” [sic] which was awarded the Femina prize last spring, has just been voted the “James Tait Black Memorial Literary Prize,” worth approximately £250.

Miss Radclyffe Hall is known everywhere for her golden Eton crop and her monocle. She is often called the “monocled authoress,” but although she wears the monocle regularly she seldom uses it.

“The news came to me on Christmas Eve, and I can safely say that I

Westminster Gazette, April 12, 1927

Western Morning News, January 4, 1928

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The Well of Loneliness

RADCLYFFE HALL, THE WELL OF LONELINESS (1928) Paris was always beloved and always new, always a signal for carefree enjoyment.

It became peculiarly ‘ours’ and until the summer of 1926, when she was actually beginning to write the book, nobody was less aware than John that she was absorbing copy for The Well of Loneliness. . . . On arrival in Paris we were met by another manifestation of French character. If Monte Carlo was empty, Paris was full, attending the Salon de l’Automobile, and when we arrived at the Osborne Hotel, to which I had telephoned from Monte Carlo, the proprietor informed us calmly that he had no vacant rooms. He did not deny the fact of promised reservations but remarked that these had been ‘seulement par téléphone’. . . . I remember trailing round Paris in a taxi, with John exhausted and barely convalescent, clutching as usual the inevitable dog (a griffon bitch not destined to survive quarantine), while eight hotels in succession refused us hospitality. At the Continental the porter went so far as to run out to our taxi, before it had pulled up, to inform us that they were full and already had a waiting list. . . . There are times when the most confirmed British globe-trotters would give the earth to be back in England! But eventually we had luck at the Hotel Pont Royal, quiet and pleasant in the rue du Bac, and there in a bedroom converted into a study, John wrote much of The Well of Loneliness. It was one of three communicating rooms and we were happy enough there for several months. True, we shared a chronic dislike of hotel food, but luckily we also shared a passion for ‘café completes’ and I should not like to say how many thousand of these we consumed in the course of our peregrinations. We always stipulated when arranging ‘terms’ to be allowed a café complet in the place of a meal. . . . What nobody foresaw was that the republication in Paris would be followed by translation into eleven languages, by the triumph of the book in the United States of America and the sale of more than a million copies.

Una Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

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The Well of Loneliness

Times Literary Supplement, August 2, 1928

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Miss Radclyffe Hall’s latest work THE WELL OF LONELINESS (Cape, 15s. net) is a novel, and we propose to treat it as such. We therefore rather regret that it should have been thought necessary to insert at the beginning a “commentary” by Mr. Havelock Ellis to the effect that, apart from its qualities as a novel, it “possesses a notable psychological and sociological significance” as a presentation, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, of a particular aspect of sexual life to the book as a work of art this testimony adds nothing; on the other hand, the documentary significance of a work of fiction seems to us small. The presence of this commentary, however, points to the criticism which, with all our admiration for much of the detail, we feel compelled to express – namely, that this long novel, sincere, courageous, high-minded, and often beautifully expressed as it is, fails as a work of art through divided purpose. It is meant as a thesis and a challenge as well as an artistic creation.

There is no ambiguity about the nature of the thesis. Stephen Gordon, the central figure, was meant by her parents to be a boy; and a boy she was born in all but the physical characteristics of sex. Her painful story, beginning in infancy and continuing to middle-age, is meant to express the bitter cry of the female invert, the man-woman, born through no fault of her own into a world which denies her a place in it and persecutes her kind by isolating them from all the happy and fine contacts of life, without regard for their highest mental qualities or for

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the invert’s consciousness of loving no less nobly than any other human being. Stephen’s life is one long tragedy, first of in comprehension, as one contact after another in childhood warns her that she is unlike other girls – and this part of the book, the childhood at Morton, passed under her loving but bewildered father’s protection, shows all this writer’s quality of evoking beauty and visualising human scenes with an extraordinary clarity of outline – then of horrified repugnance when a man friend woos her, and of a romantic passion for the wife of a neighbour, ignobly betrayed and leading to an irreparable break with her home and her mother: thereafter of a long effort to forget herself in work, and finally of love realised with the girl called Mary Llewelyn, of the hideous exiled life in Paris to which such women are condemned, and of the last agony, when, by a desperate simulation of unfaithfulness, she drives Mary into the arms of the man who wishes to make her his wife – the very man-friend of her own early happiness. There is no relief, the stages of an abnormal person’s life succeed one another inevitably, with a profusion of detail which, though adorned with a high and poetic literary talent, is excessive for the work of imagination. More and more, towards the end, one feels the artistic inspiration fade and the desire increase to probe to the bottom the pains of an abnormal growth upon the social body. The tone rises into that of a challenge, now angry, now pitiful, to the world and, as the heroine vows in her last agony to the Creator. The final

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chapters, describing the unhappy, segregated, unreal life of Stephen, Mary and their congeners in Paris are extremely painful, as they are intended to be. As such we must leave them to the interested reader, with all the discords unresolved: yet undoubtedly in this book the recognised talents of Miss Hall in themselves are as conspicuous as before, and against any

feelings of repugnance at her uncompromising sincerity must be set respect for her intentions, frequent admiration for her treatment, and only regret that the statement of an insoluble problem so passionately presented itself as a theme.

Times Literary Supplement, August 2, 1928

THE CURSE OF CAIN “The Well of Loneliness: A Novel” (Cape) by Radclyffe Hall, is a very difficult work to review. Should I praise it, then I can literally hear the huge army of the narrow-minded hinting that I am in sympathy with its publication. Should, on the other hand, I dismiss it as a novel written on a subject which is unmentionable, then I should condemn a work of considerable art; a story which is poignantly tragic to a degree; one of the few books I have ever read which illustrates the pitiful loneliness of sexual perversity as it is, apart from the pervert’s psychological and biological significance. Every work of art, every undertaking designed in all seriousness, must, however, be viewed objectively. One may have little or no sympathy with the subject – but that is not the point. Criticism should not be prejudice disguised as erudition, though only too often it is thus bedecked. In any case, only the bigoted and the foolish seek to ignore an aspect of life which is as undeniable a fact as any concrete thing. To deny

something because you dislike to confess that it is true belongs to the mentality of the undeveloped. Certain facts must be faced and, however unpleasant they may be from the normal point of view, it is better to face them – and to seek to understand them – than to persecute them ruthlessly. There are few more inwardly tragic figures in the whole of the human world than those whose nature appears to the majority as unnatural. The world condemns this unnaturalness as if it were a wilful thing. Alas! that everything which is natural to a man or woman belongs to nature! Heaven help those, then, whose nature is not in accordance with the majority! Pity them rather, since the secrets of biology are often unfathomable secrets. One should no more persecute a person for what he is, providing what he is interferes with no man, than one should persecute those who are born maimed and blind and horribly disfigured. This, however, belongs to that universal sympathy which is rare. The majority delight in trampling under their feet the people 69

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whose nature they cannot understand, no matter how spiritually lofty, how mentally brilliant, how pitiful, or how lonely may be the lives of those on whom they trample. . . . The relation of this tragedy is remarkable for its truth and realism.

The pining for love and affection which, cruelly enough, wants the life of the pervert in direct ratio, it would appear, to the difficulty of its fulfilment, is disturbing in its verisimilitude. The wild generosity, the selfsacrifice, the humility by which poor wretched Stephen tried to gain and hold the love of those who returned, or pretended to return, her love, belongs entirely to those life-tragedies which few have dared to tell, so pitiful are they, so entirely without respite. And no one condemned her more when the truth was out than the woman who had given her birth, and, who knows, may all unconsciously have helped to make her daughter what she was!

Leaving the home she loved, the home which might have influenced her for good, or at least brought peace, Ste-

phen settled in Paris. Such as she can live out their lives there – a colony to themselves. She was fortunate in being a rich woman. Persecution and condemnation only made her the more courageous. She could afford to be brave, financially I mean. In parenthesis, she condemns quite often those who struggle to hide the curse which Nature has brought down upon them.

She is wrong. She should have greater pity, greater understanding, greater sympathy. One can live out one’s life, whatever it may be, so much more easily on an income of several thousands a year. Stephen in Paris became no longer the complete “outlaw.” And yet an outlaw she remained – she and her like the normal world would not accept her for the woman she was in all that matters, in intelligence and dignity and kindness, because, in the really important matter of sex-urge she was not as normal people are.

Richard King, The Tatler, August 15, 1928

THE STUNTERS AND THE STUNTED Will stunt journalism be allowed to cripple and degrade English literature?

The question is raised by an article in a Sunday newspaper clamouring for the suppression of a novel, The Well of Loneliness, written by Miss Radclyffe Hall and published by Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd, price 15s.

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The book is the story of an abnormal woman. It is a restrained and serious psychological study. It is written “with understanding and practice, with sympathy and feeling,” says The Nation. It is “sincere, courageous, high-minded and often beautifully expressed,” says The Times Literary Supplement.

The Well of Loneliness

But the stunt journalist, writing for a Sunday newspaper which revels in the revelations of murderers and in the views and confessions of the unfortunate persons made notorious by the terrible ordeal of trial for murder, can see here an opportunity for sensationmongering. No sensible man or woman can believe that a novelist of high repute would issue through a publishing firm, also of high repute, a book which is “not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library.” We quote here the journalist who has assumed the role of censor of English fiction.

In this book there is nothing pornographic. The evil-minded will seek in vain in these pages for any stimulant to sexual excitement. The lustful sheikhs and cavemen and vamps of popular fiction may continue their sadistic course unchecked in those pornographic novels which are sold by the millions, but Miss Radclyffe Hall has entirely ignored these crude and violent figures of sexual melodrama.

She has given to English literature a profound and moving study of a profound and moving problem.

To cry for the suppression of this book is to label oneself as prurient.

The greatest of all English journalists, Daniel Defoe, wrote Moll Flanders.

This is not a book for children, but

even our stunt journalist would hardly clamour for its suppression. Must Swift and Smollett and Sterne be banned by the publishers and the libraries because they often wrote of the vices and perversities of mankind? should our Shakespeare be cut by stunt journalists and our Bible bowdlerised?

The stunt journalist quotes Mr Havelock Ellis, who says, in a prefatory commentary on The Well of Loneliness: “apart from its fine qualities as a novel, it possesses a notable psychological and sociological significance.”

That is a judgement which all fairminded people will prefer to the wild and foolish remark of the Sunday paper writer that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” And to talk about this book as “killing souls” is a shameful thing.

Mr Havelock Ellis is one of the greatest living sociologists and ranks with the masters of modern literature.

His verdict, I repeat, is more likely to carry weight with thoughtful people than the vapourings of the editor of the Sunday Express.

Arnold Dawson, The Daily Herald, August 20, 1928

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Sir, – We have today received a request from the Home Secretary asking us to discontinue publication of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel: “The Well of Loneliness.” We have already expressed our readiness to fall in with the wishes of the Home Office in this The Times, August 23, 1928

“SECRET NOVEL” THE PEOPLE’S CRITICISM IS JUSTIFIED. HOME SECRETARY AGREES WITH US.

The “secret novel” to which “The People” drew attention last week has been withdrawn by the publishers at the request of the Home Secretary.

While other newspapers were trying to make up their minds about the book, “The People” had already decided that the revolting aspect of modern life with which it dealt made its publication undesirable.

Further, “The People” announced exclusively, a week ago, that the novel, and the banning of it, were under official consideration.

The Home Secretary’s acceded request for the books withdrawal is a triumphant vindication of “The People’s” judgement.

We refused, at the time, to add to the moral danger the book represented by publishing either the name of the novel or the name of the author.

Now, however, that the publishers have wisely endorsed “The People’s” 72

matter, and we have therefore stopped publication.

I have the honour to be your obedient servant, Jonathan Cape (for and on behalf of Jonathan Cape, Ltd). verdict, thus removing the novel from the reach of those upon whom it might have had a harmful effect, we think it only right that the public should know the title of the book and the author and also our reasons for urging the withdrawal of the work.

First these facts: The title, ‘The Wells [sic] of Loneliness.”

The author, Miss Radclyffe Hall.

The publishers, Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd. The story is that of a girl who, said the publishers in their own description, “is born out of her own sphere.”

Revolting That girl was born to parents who planned, hoped, and expected that their child would be a son. Their disappointment was great. The inference is that the parents’ expectations had a disastrous effect upon the child, who began with a boy’s instincts, a boy’s thoughts, which later developed into the instincts and thoughts of a man.

So far, so good. The author had tried to explain just why this should come about. But explanation is extenuation, and from then on Ms Hall

The Well of Loneliness

seeks not only to explain a pervert “heroine,” but also to justify her. She even comes near to giving her a halo.

From the moment when the “heroine” finds her friend in the arms of a lover, the horror of the book deepens and, in describing certain places and people in Paris, it goes even further beyond the limit of what is decent.

Especially do we revolt when we find her putting into the lips of her unfortunate character words which one expects only from the lips of a man to the woman he loves.

The People, August 26, 1928

THE SUPPRESSED BOOK I happened to visit two well-known London bookshops today, and I had not been in either five minutes before I heard mention made of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s suppressed book. In one shop a customer enquired whether a copy could still be obtained through the circulating library department, and was told that the probable policy of the library would be to withdraw all copies

in circulation as soon as they were returned, and issue no more. In the other shop a customer was expressing at some length to an assistant his views on the unfairness, not so much of the suppression, as of the methods adopted to bring it about.

Yorkshire Post, August 28, 1928

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The Home Secretary is to be congratulated on having secured the suppression of “The Well of Loneliness” without setting the Public Prosecutor in action. The book is mischievous and unwholesome; but a prosecution would certainly have failed, because there is not an indecent word or an obscene image in it from the first to the last page. The police authorities are well aware that prosecutions for sexual abnormality, even when a conviction is obtained, do more harm than good, and always, if they can, avoid proceedings. In this case there arose the question, not of course of personal

misconduct, but of the legal liability of the author and publisher of a so-called novel, which was clearly contra bonos mores, injurious to public morals. The female “invert,” up to now regarded as a hysterical half-wit, is by Miss Radclyffe Hall described as the victim of a pre-disposition or pre-natal taint. Possibly, but is not the same true of the male invert? Happily the question has been settled by the good taste and common sense of Messrs. Cape, who agreed at once to withdraw the book.

WOMAN NOVELIST’S ADDRESS IN LEEDS

and better to write about things as they really were. Realism could be overemphasised, but if a book was to carry conviction the realism should imply nothing indecent, and there should be balance and proportion.

There were certain books which a portion of the public would refuse to read because they dealt with problems that they would prefer to forget. This was unfair. If women refused to hear the real facts, they could never help to improve conditions. She deplored the recent suppression of “The Well of Loneliness,” by Miss Radclyffe Hall.

This book, she said, dealt with a problem that should not be ignored and was a very sincere work.

The Leeds Women’s Luncheon Club opened its winter session yesterday, with an address by Miss E. M. Delafield, the novelist, on “Studies in Everyday Life.”

Miss Delafield said she thought that it was the absence of the everyday life element that annoyed the reader of modern novels. It had, of course, been urged that people wanted to escape from everyday life by way of sensational fiction, but she hoped that that was not true. Women were too grownup to enjoy this kind of literature: they wanted to face facts.

Speaking from the point of view of a writer, she said that it was braver

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The Tatler, September 5, 1928

Yorkshire Post, October 5, 1928

The Well of Loneliness

Sir, – If the Home Secretary had read Mr Havelock Ellis’s Affirmations, or The Dance of Life, or Impressions and Comments he would have known that so sane and beautiful a writer could not have advocated the reading of a book which panders to obscenity or pornography.

I have read Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel with interest and I hope with understanding, and I am amazed at the action of the Home Secretary. Or I should be amazed if I regarded him as being enlightened as to what is, and what is not pornographic.

The authoress has treated a difficult subject bravely, and with a dignity of purpose; and because one newspaper, avid for a “stunt,” raises a yell of unintelligent protest, the Home Secretary takes drastic action.

It is an insult to the intelligence of readers who are not patrons of the suggestive fiction which roams – nay, gallops – at will all over the country.

No wonder Mr. Jonathan Cape used the word “smuthounds.” Miss Radclyffe Hall is a victim to them.

They will always lift their nasty eyes aloft, when they have an audience.

But that a British Home Secretary should be influenced by such go-tomentality, is a sad reflection on the balance of those, who, sitting in high places, should know better than to obey the behest of such vulgar clamour.

‘REALIST,’ Publisher and Bookseller, August 1928

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It may be interesting to know that Radclyffe Hall’s novel about Lesbians, The Well of Loneliness, though banned in England and under fire in New York, has escaped condemnation in France, where it now enjoys a local printing. Its biggest daily sale takes place from the news vendor’s cart serving the deluxe train for London, La Flèche d’Or, at the Garde du Nord.

The price is one hundred and twentyfive francs a copy. For first English editions, dealers in the Rue de Castiglione offered to buy for as high as six thousand francs, and to sell at as high as anything you are silly enough to pay.

At my flat in Paris I found a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness” and, incidentally, many thanks to the sender whose handwriting on the address I did not recognise! I read it from cover to cover with breathless interest, and very soon, no doubt, I shall read it again. Rarely has Paris “been so well done,” and not only the pages referring to a certain Paris and a certain milieu of that certain Paris, but the whole atmosphere of my beloved city. I am told that this novel has started a certain amount of yapping, and this seems curious to me, for I have read several notices of it in the columns of such “pillars of the Press” as “The Sunday Times,” “The Morning Post,” “The Saturday Review,” and “The Telegraph,” which were, in most cases, understanding and appreciative.

Strange the difficulty that some people have to keep calm when any pitiful aspect of sexual life is discussed. Pitiful? Why, of course. No one deliberately wants to be uncomfortable, and anything abnormal is dashed uncomfy. A congenital deaf-mute bungs a notice (metaphorically or otherwise) round his neck demanding pity for his “pore” self, upon which the world fills his tin mug with pennies, or teaches him Braille, holds his hand. Radclyffe Hall shows so clearly the pre-natal influences that, in most cases, cause the inversion of sexual instinct that, it seems to me, one should pity the “pore invert” quite as much as the “pore” anything else that has its parents sins – or merely omissions – to answer for.

Janet Flanner, ‘Letter from Paris,’ New Yorker, 1929

‘Priscilla in Paris,’ The Tatler, September 12, 1928

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The Well of Loneliness

BANNED BOOK APPEAL FAILS DANGEROUS AND CORRUPTING SAYS SESSIONS CHAIRMAN

Sir Robert Wallace, K.C., and a Bench of about twenty Justices heard the appeal regarding Miss Radclyffe Hall’s book, “The Well of Loneliness” at London Sessions yesterday.

The appellants were Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Limited, the publishers, and Mister Leopold B. Hill of great Russell Street, W.C., the representative of the Pegasus Press, of Paris, the printers of the book.

The appeal was against the decision that copies of the book seized by the police be destroyed on the ground that the book was obscene.

Mr Rudyard Kipling sat behind Council, and amongst others present were Dr Marie Stokes and Sir William Wilcox. . . It was quite plain that after Messrs. Jonathan Cape had written the letter to the Home Secretary they were taking steps to produce the book in France. . .

When information came to the authorities that the book was being imported in considerable quantities into this country they took steps which resulted in the warrant being obtained and the seizure of two hundred and forty-seven copies in the hands of Mister Hill. . .

Mr. J.B. Melville, K.C., for the appellants, said the submission was that the book was a true work of literature.

Counsel said that at the police court they had some dozen witnesses who were prepared to give their views upon the worth, the value and the decency of the book. That evidence, however was excluded.

“I have searched the book from end to end,” said counsel, “to see if I could find any passages that might be considered coarse. I failed to find any.

This is a grave treatment and a reverent treatment of a human problem which exists.”

In giving the decision of the Court, Sir Robert Wallace said there were plenty of people who would not be depraved or corrupted by reading this book, but there were also those whose minds were open to such immoral influences.

“The view of this Court is that this book is very subtle, insinuating in the theme it propounds, and much more dangerous because of that fact.

“It is the view of this Court that this is a most dangerous and corrupting book . . . that it is a disgusting book, a book which is prejudicial to the morals of the community, and in our view the order made by the magistrate was a fair one, and the appeal is dismissed with costs.

Daily Mirror, December 15, 1928

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At this moment our thoughts center upon Sapphism. We have to uphold the morality of that Well of all that's stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other; The Well of Loneliness.

Virginia Woolf, letter

The dulness [sic] of the book is such that any indecency may lurk there — one simply can’t keep one's eyes on the page.

Virginia Woolf, letter

The pale tepid vapid book which lay damp and slab all about the court.

Virginia Woolf, diary

“The Well of Loneliness” is restrained and perfectly decent, and the treatment of its theme is unexceptionable. It has obviously been suppressed because of the theme itself. May we add a few words on this point?

The subject-matter of the book exists as a fact among the many other facts of life. It is recognised by science and recognisable in history. It forms, of course, an extremely small fraction of the sum-total of human emotions, it enters personally into very few lives, and is uninteresting or repellent to the majority; nevertheless it exists, and novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention it by Sir W. Joynson-Hicks. May they mention it incidentally? Although it is forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? Perhaps the Home Secretary will issue further orders on this point.

Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, letter to The Nation

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The Well of Loneliness

All the seized copies of Miss Radclyffe Hall’s novel, “The Well of Loneliness,” will early this week help to warm the many rooms of New Scotland Yard.

It is understood that the copies of the book, which are now under lock and key, will be fed into the furnaces in the basement of New Scotland Yard

and be destroyed. The destruction of the books will be conducted under the supervision of at least one officer of high rank.

Aberdeen Press and Journal December 17, 1928

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NOVEL “LONELINESS” IS RULED OBSCENE Magistrate Holds Publishers of Radclyffe Hall Book for Trial and Charge.

SAYS IT AIMS TO DEPRAVE

Admits Literary Merit of Work is Not Disputed – Covici Promises Fight “to the Bitter End.” Magistrate Hyman Bushel in the Tombs Court ruled yesterday that the book “The Well of Loneliness” by the Englishwoman writer Radclyffe Hall is obscene and was printed and distributed in this city in violation of the penal law. He ordered a complaint drawn

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against the Covici, Friede Corporation, American publishers of the book, at 79 West Forty-fifth Street, and Donald Friede, the vice president, on which he sent the case to Special Sessions the trial.

Mr. Friede, who was in court when the decision was announced, was promptly arrested, but freed in $500 bail, which he furnished in cash. No bail was fixed in the case of the corporation. Hearings were held several weeks ago by the magistrate in the West Side Court in a proceeding started by John S. Simner, superintendent of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, who had seized 855 copies of the novel at the publisher’s office.

New York Times, February 22, 1929

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The first night [of the stage version The Well of Loneliness at the Théâtre de La Potinière in Paris, in the fall of 1930] was something of a riot, owing to the pacific timidity of the ushers in making large ladies sit in the right seats and the belligerent broadmindedness of the large ladies toward everything except the ushers. Also, to top three acts of tableaux vivants, containing eleven scenes, Miss Wilette Kershaw made a curtain speech in which she begged humanity, ‘already used to earthquakes and murderers,’ to try to put up with a minor calamity like the play’s and the book’s Lesbian protagonist Stephen Gordon. Howev-

er, she made up in costume what she lacked in psychology: dressing gown

by Sulka, riding breeches by Hoare, boots by Bunting, crop by Briggs, briquet by Dunhill, and British accent – as the program did not bother to state – by Broadway. . . Miss Radclyffe Hall’s press statement that she knew nothing about the adaptation of her novel, and as soon as she did would go to law, made the public fear that her – well, loneliness was greater than had been supposed.

Janet Flanner, ‘Letter from Paris,’ New Yorker, 1930

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THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RADCLYFFE HALL I wonder whether I, who am unskilled in writing, can ever find words to describe, even dimly, that strange and fulfilling happiness that blossomed for us as we knelt together in the Garden of Gethesemane. It is true that, being still clothed in human flesh, we could not always hold on to that happiness, and of that John’s wisdom was quick to warn me, foreseeing that in the long days ahead there would be hours when darkness would cover the earth. ‘One cannot always remain on the peaks,’ was how she put it, ‘we shall sometimes have to go down into the valleys.’

But even I who must wait in loneliness have learned for my sustaining that there is no joy on earth that can compare with that which is the child of love and sorrow and which is the pledge of the perfect joy that is to come. It was towards the end of March 1943 that she was suddenly taken acutely ill. . .

For herself she had no fear of death and no desire to live and I realize now, as I refused to do at the time, the horror with which she personally envisaged a life such as would, at the best, have been hers. A life of complete invalidism in conditions repugnant to her in every way and with inevitable decline and a possibly agonizing death beyond it. For my sake and because she hated to leave me, she accepted this prospect with unfailing cheerfulness, but sometimes she would look at me and say: ‘It’s only for your sake that I want to live, I want to go on taking care of you and not to leave you alone’, and when, at times, the flame burnt very low, she would whisper: ‘I am putting up a good fight, it’s entirely for your sake, and I shall go on fighting. . . .’

She had always believed that I would survive her and after her death I found that she had written me a letter and in it she said: ‘God keep you until we meet again . . . and believe in my love, which is much, much stronger than mere death. . . .’

Una Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

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The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall

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