The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Book

The wealthy, conservative lesbian Radclyffe Hall is remembered now for a single brave act: the publication of her troubling classic The Well of Loneliness (1928), the first novel in English on the theme of "sexual inversion." It appeared the same year as Virginia Woolf's jeu d'esprit Orlando, which is more or less about Woolf's love of Vita Sackville-West, but the authorities failed to decipher the subversive undertone of Woolf's modernist prose--and it was Hall's blandly realistic novel that was seized and banned. The best yet of Diana Souhami's biographies, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall is an absorbing and irreverent account of Hall's life and work, with emphasis on the stormy reception of The Well of Loneliness and Hall's long relationship with the artist Una Troubridge, "a formidable acolyte, an indispensable servant, even if there was the grip of tentacles about her and the clink of chains." --Regina Marler Read More