Customer Reviews

The Trial of Radclyffe Hall

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There is no shortage of Radclyffe Hall biographies, so it was with something approaching ennui that I made a start on this book. The effect is something like a bucket of cold water over the head! The warts-and-all biography is alive and kicking! Diana Souhami has written a book that is both fresh and thoroughly researched which forces us to do the best thing a biography can make us do - view the subject with fresh eyes. Absolutely no punches are pulled and we experience the vividness of Radclyffe Hall's life, the horrible childhood, the pointless spiritual dabbling, the suffocating upper-class lesbian coteries, we practically live her relationships with Mabel Batten, Una Troubridge, Eugenia Souline.There is a lot to dislike in this subject who in many ways behaved like a spoiled child, sacking servants and disposing of pets without a moment's thought. But there is also a shining flame of fierce courage, and we see here the huge cost of coming out as a lesbian in those early days. Three cheers for Diana Souhami!I urge you to read this book!

I recommend reading Diana Souhami's biography of the writer Marguerite "John" (Twonnie) Radclyffe Hall. The author's prose is lucid. The book contains documentation and photographs of this rather extraordinary "sexual invert," as Radclyffe Hall insisted upon labeling herself and others like her. Extraordinary in large part because of the hoopla and trial that unfolded around Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Souhami's biography presents a full account of Radclyffe Hall's: troubled childhood; poetry and fiction publications; beloveds; animals and birds (cherished, but quickly abandoned when they did not "obey" her); law suits (she was perpetually willing and financially able to sue anyone at anytime); and writing and editing processes. This is an interesting biography of an interesting woman.

Radclyffe Hall was not a major literary figure-- but she was an immensely fascinating one. She's not less fascinating because there were so many things to dislike (depressing love affairs, callousness about pets, and a definite preference for fascism).

What Souhami manages to do is to paint a picture that owns the negative without playing down the brave and even important side to Hall's life. For the students of history and sexual politics, the trials surrounding the Well of Loneliness make fascinating reading and we see them through this book in a totally different light than I've seen them before.

Great biography.