She's best known as the author of The Well of Loneliness, "the one lesbian novel everyone has heard of," feminist scholar Sally Cline wittily remarks. But in her lifetime (1880-1943), Radclyffe Hall was a popular writer who deliberately courted controversy with her fifth novel, banned as obscene in 1928 after one of the 20th century's most notorious literary trials. Cline devotes valuable critical attention to Hall's other books, and to a flamboyant personal life (a virtual who's who of homosexual Britain) that was at odds with her political and religious conservatism.

From Kirkus Reviews
This workmanlike biography is a welcome fleshing out of a writer still largely known for just one of her books, the pioneering lesbian apologia The Well of Loneliness. Cambridge University scholar Cline (Women, Passion and Celibacy, 1994, etc.) gives Hall (18801943) her due by devoting equal attention to her other works, which in her own time made her a broadly admired writer with a fairly unadventurous style. Hall was a prize-winning novelist (and a poet whose sentimental verses were set to music and became popular anthems) long before she set out to explain the sexual ``inversion'' of women to a heterosexual audience. When The Well of Loneliness came around in 1928, however, Hall was very much in the vanguard in theme, if not in form. Cline's strength lies not so much in psychological insight on Hall herself as in the elucidation of the sexual issues--and more general themes such as the experience of the outsider, courage and spiritual searching--that governed Hall's life and writing. Many of these themes--varying speculations on the nature of homosexuality, the subversion of gender norms--have become familiar, but Cline very vividly portrays an era when they were thrilling discoveries daringly lived out by individual pioneers like Hall herself and the wide cast of colorful characters Cline assembles. The independently wealthy Hall moved in racy circles with the likes of Violet Hunt and Tallulah Bankhead; her longtime partner, Una Troubridge, was the wife of an admiral, whose social company had run to Churchills and Asquiths. Cline limns the polymorphous existence of lesbianism among different classes of women over Hall's lifetime, from a late Victorian tolerance of intimate female ``friendship'' to the harsh moralistic attacks on The Well of Loneliness. Apart from its valuable contribution to the study of lesbian literature per se, this biography dramatizes through Hall's life the complex and still often surprising sexual politics of the early century. (16 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Radclyffe Hall was a legend in her own lifetime and her fame has never faded. She was also a lesbian, which became part of that legend. Christened Marguerite, a shy child with golden curls and Victorian muslin dresses, she became - at a time when men wore the trousers - a flamboyant character who smoked small green cigars, cross-dressed in Chinese silk smoking jackets, and called herself John. In 1928, when she was forty-eight, her fifth novel, The Well of Loneliness, was banned for obscenity, despite protests from leading literary and political figures, turning the book into a bestseller and bringing Hall literary fame. First a serious poet and novelist, then a cause celebre, Hall was also a sometime feminist, a member of the Natalie Barney-Djuna Barnes Paris circle, and a Catholic convert who believed in spiritualism. In this, the first major biography of this influential, ultra-flamboyant lesbian novelist, Sally Cline uses new material to explore the connections among Hall's writing, life, and milieu, meticulously analyzing the effects on a writer of her readiness to become a martyr to a cause.

SYNOPSIS

First a serious poet and novelist, then a cause cTlFbre, Radclyffe Hall was also a sometime feminist and a Catholic convert who believed in spiritualism. Cline uses new materials to explore the connections between Hall's writings and her life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

A biography of poet and novelist Hall, who became a literary cause clbre when her fifth novel, (one of the first novels to openly discuss lesbianism) was banned for obscenity. The author discusses how Hall's lesbian relationships, infidelities, staunch Catholicism, and willingness to possibly martyr her literary career by publishing affected her writing and vice versa. She also finds that the novel and the furor that surrounded it didn't represent the break with earlier work as some writers have portrayed it, and that Hall was not the loner that her reputation makes her out to be. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Judith Newman