Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (Between Men - Between Women: Lesbian & Gay Studies) Book

In her landmark study, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, Terry Castle called on feminist and lesbian historians to "focus on presence instead of absence, plenitude instead of scarcity." Her binary portrait of Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall traces the friendship and compares the public perceptions of these two homosexual icons of the 1930s. Castle suggests that these two very different writers influenced each other's work in surprising ways. The homosexual playwright, Jonathan Brockett, who appears in Hall's lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, bears a striking resemblance to Coward. The blithe spirit that hovers over Coward's play of the same name may have had its genesis in Hall's ideas and writings about the supernatural. This well illustrated book also shows that Hall and Coward shared a fashion sense.