Title: Radclyffe Hall : a life in the writing /
Authors: Dellamora, Richard.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press,
Year: 2011
Subjects: Hall, Radclyffe Criticism and interpretation.; Lesbianism in literature.; Spiritualism in literature.
Abstract: "The Well of Loneliness is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex scenes, yet in 1928, the year in which the novel was published, it was deemed obscene in a British court of law for its defense of sexual inversion and was forbidden for sale or import into England. Its author, Radclyffe Hall, was already well-known as a writer and West End celebrity, but the fame and notoriety of that one book has all but eclipsed a literary output of some half-dozen other novels and several volumes of poetry. In [this book, the author] offers the first full look at the entire range of Hall's published and unpublished works of fiction, poetry, and autobiography and reads through them to demonstrate how she continually played with the details of her own life to help fashion her own identity as well as to bring into existence a public lesbian culture. Along the way, [the author] revises many of the truisms about Hall that had their origins in the memoirs of her long-term partner, Una Troubridge, and that have found an afterlife in the writings of Hall's biographers. In detailing Hall's explorations of the self, [the author] is the first seriously to consider their contexts in Freudian psychoanalysis as understood in England in the 1920s. As important, he uncovers Hall's involvement with other modes of speculative psychology, including Spiritualism, Theosophy, and an eclectic brand of Christian and Buddhist mysticism. [The author's] Hall is a woman of complex accommodations, able to reconcile her marriage to Troubridge with her passionate affairs with other women, and her experimental approach to gender and sexuality with her conservative politics and Catholicism. She is, above all, a thinker continually inventive about the connections between selfhood and desire, a figure who has much to contribute to our own efforts to understand transgendered and transsexual existence today."--Jacket.
Contents: Reading the poetry -- Psychic incorporation : war, mourning, and the technology of mediumship -- Symbiosis of publicity and privacy : the slander trial of 1920 -- The unlit lamp : a feminist experiment -- Paris and the culture of auto/biography in The forge -- Una Troubridge and gender performativity in A saturday life -- Catholicism, Adam's breed, and the sacred Well -- The well of loneliness as an activist text -- From sexual inversion to cross gender in "Miss Ogilvy finds herself" -- After economic man : "the rest cure, 1932" -- Oneself as the other : Hall, Evguenia souline, and the final writing.