Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing.

Stephenson, Mimosa

Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. By Richard Dellamora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8122-4346-8. Pp. xxii + 319. $34.95.

The title of Richard Dellamora's study of Radclyffe Hall misleads the reader as the book is only marginally a biography. Many studies of writers' lives turn into critical biographies, but this study presents little literary criticism. It does present major dates and happenings in Hall's life, but most of the book goes somewhat afield in addressing her milieu, relatives, friends, and interests. Dellamora sees Hall's life as an experiment in living daringly and courageously while she worked to change the hostile environment she saw as threatening her and others with same-sex desire, which she argued was congenital and God-given.

Feeling that traditional biography limits the affective aspect of the subject's life, Dellamore seeks to draw Hall's feelings from the poetry and fiction, which he finds to contain much biographical and autobiographical material. He considers, as have biographers before him, many incomplete and unpublished pieces that have survived, such as an autobiographical essay in which Hall narrates the story of her unsatisfactory upbringing with an abusive mother and absent father and shows how she failed to develop essential connections with her roots in her dysfunctional family and home life, even though her parents were upper-middle-class and well-to-do. Hall's five books of poetry are especially revealing about her affective life. In the poetry she argues that ties with women are emotional and fleeting. That stance seems appropriate as Hall eventually betrayed each of her three long-term lovers.

Dellamora also makes clear that Hall owed much of her success to partnerships with these lovers--Mabel Batten, Una Troubridge, and Evguenia Souline--all of whom may be found in her work. Noting that Diana Souhami in The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (1998) posits that Hall was probably dyslexic, Dellamora argues that Batten and Troubridge served as collaborators, correcting Hall's drafts to make them presentable before submission for publication. Also much of the poetry reveals Hall's love for Batten; Sidonia Shore in A Saturday Life (1925) fictionalizes Troubridge; and Hall repeatedly wrote that Souline was the inspiration for the unfinished Emblem Hurlstone, The Sixth Beatitude (1936), and The Shoemaker of Merano (which Troubridge destroyed after Hall's death).

Dellamora includes a long section on Spiritualism as after the death of Batten (whose sudden death from stroke she felt she had caused by her infidelity with Troubridge) Hall and Troubridge devoted considerable time, energy, and resources to contacting Battens spirit in the other world and seeking forgiveness from Batten and her acceptance of their relationship with each other. Dellamora explains beliefs and practices of Spiritualism, especially seances, as they were the major method of attempting to contact the dead practiced by Hall and Troubridge. Hall delivered a long lecture reporting on their sittings with the popular medium Mrs. Gladys Osborne Leonard. Dellamora discusses at length Hall's and Troubridge's membership in the Society for Psychical Research and the suit for slander Hall prosecuted against St. George Lane Fox-Pitt because of his verbal opposition to her election to the society's Council.

Dellamora treats each of the novels in turn, describing its genesis in Hall's own life and that of her contemporaries, presenting a bit of literary criticism, and relating the novel to Dellamora's argument that all of the novels are in one form or another about same-sex desire; Hall invites her readers to see the plight of her characters and to choose to make life better for people like the author whose sexual orientation was designed by God. Much of Dellamora's book is devoted to Hall's lesbian friends, especially to well known writers and artists such as Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks. In addition to biographical information about these contemporaries, Dellamora includes portraits of several of them. He also finds that these friends reappear in slightly veiled form in Hall's novels; for instance, Brooks was offended that she had been drawn as Venetia Ford in The Forge (1924). According to Dellamora, all of Hall's work is an attempt to justify herself and her homosexuality.

He also proposes that all of Hall's work has religious themes, especially the theme of self-sacrifice. Hall's most famous poem, "The Blind Ploughman," was set to music and sung to large audiences during the First World War. The last stanza reads, "God has made his sun to shine / On both you and me; / God, who took away my eyes, / That my soul might see!" (47). In addition to Spiritualism, Hall was interested in Theosophy even though she was a Roman Catholic and confessed her spiritualistic practices, hoping to find a priest who would find them acceptable (though she did not). The theosophical belief in reincarnation provides an explanation for the mercurial character of the multi-talented Sidonia Shore in A Saturday Life. Hall believed that reincarnation might explain her sexual orientation as individuals might reside in bodies of different genders in their various incarnations.

Hall's Roman Catholicism becomes most apparent in her fourth and best novel, Adam's Breed (1926), a bestseller which won both the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. The Well of Loneliness (1928), for which Hall remains famous, likewise contains a religious dimension as Hall argues that same-sex desire is inborn. The novel is a plea for social acceptance of those so born and ends, "We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!" (437). Dellamora points out that in The Well of Loneliness Hall's spokeswoman, Valerie Seymour, advises her heroine, Stephen Gordon, "to create a metaphorics, mythology, and metaphysics of their own" (255). Dellamora suggests that Hall felt that if Christianity did not fit her lifestyle, she should found a new religion that would. Dellamora's final words relate to the Christian aspects of Hall's work: "Moreover, the focus on extreme, self-lacerating pain that one finds in the letters and the embrace of martyrdom and a self-consuming love of the other in The Sixth Beatitude both carry strong, if heterodox, overtones of the central mystery of Christianity" (263), seeing the paradoxical nature of Hall's Christian stance in her work.

Because Hall is considered to have launched outspoken defense of the lesbian lifestyle with The Well of Loneliness, she is a heroine to those with same-sex desire. Though Dellamora's study adds little about Hall's life to the many earlier biographies, he contributes subsidiary detail surrounding Hall. Troubridge wrote the first glowing biography of her friend and lover, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (1961). At her death Troubridge left Hall's papers to Lovat Dickson with the understanding that he would write a biography. His Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle (1975) presents most of the facts of Hall's life but shows his disapproval of her lifestyle with his word choices--the stigma of homosexuality, abnormal, deviant, afflicted, maimed, self-indulgence, license, depravity. Michael Baker's much more positive Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall (1985) includes the facts as well as some critical comment. Baker finds Souline (accepting the word of Troubridge) a "worthless" money-grubber who could not appreciate Hall's work, but later biographers, including Dellamora, have found her an inspiration for the author who loved her. The best biography is Sally Cline's highly readable, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (1997). Cline's balanced study shows appreciation for Hall's accomplishment at the same time that it acknowledges her weaknesses. It situates Hall's achievement in her own time and in ours, pointing out that "Today in an era of gay liberation and lesbian and feminist studies one viewpoint is that all human beings are potentially bisexual, that homosexuality is not an aberration" (35). Cline speculates that about the age of eleven Hall was sexually abused by her step-father Alberto Visetti and that that abuse plus her mother's violence may have been factors in Hall's choice of sexual orientation. Souhami's well-written, entertaining, sometimes sarcastic The Trials of Radclyffe Hall succinctly presents the facts while painting Troubridge as a grasping, controlling, unloved opportunist. A reader who wants to know about Hall should read Cline's study instead of Dellamora's, but his will be read by those fascinated by Hall as a classic, symbolic cult figure. As Dellamora phrases the situation, Hall helped to build "a lesbian public culture in England" (96).

What none of Hall's biographers says (but Dickson may imply in his title) is that "the well of loneliness" is a perfect phrase for describing the life of Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall herself. It is true that the parenting she received was abominable, but she grew up in plenty rather than poverty and she did have a wonderful grandmother who lived with her, loved her, and attempted to protect her from her abusive mother. She grew up to be a miserably unhappy hypochondriac who in her novels consistently preached on the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice (what Souhami calls her "road to Calvary theme," 139) but repeatedly betrayed the beautiful multi-talented, artistic, long-term lovers who gave up their lives to her. Baker notes that Hall and Troubridge engaged in "angry exchanges and tearful recriminations" and concludes, "Like the religious hysteric, [Hall] sought pain to achieve ecstasy. She seemed to need to hurt and humiliate, not only Una but herself, before, in the heat of apology and forgiveness, she could love" (118). In her last nine years the writer ferociously and persistently insisted that Souline also submit, but Souline refused to give up her independence. Apparently it was Souline's resistance to total domination that maintained Hall's interest those last brutal years that were a torment to Troubridge. Hall even betrayed Souline in her death as she had promised half her estate in her will but instead left all to Troubridge with the stipulation that Troubridge would take care of Souline as she felt appropriate. Even in death Hall attempted to force the resistant lover into submission. Souhami's comment seems appropriate: "She subverted what she had and believed, deconstructed her God and her politics, built up her houses in order to fracture them and in a way did the same with her relationships and work" (144). Hall's story is sad, but not because of an unaccepting society, as she believed, but because of the unchristian choices she made. She did not live up to her own belief in fidelity in relationships, and she demanded what she desired, no matter the cost to others. She made life terrible for servants and could not keep them, forgetting that Christ commands us to be servants. She was brilliant, talented, and strong-willed. Had she lived what she believed she could have resided on a mountaintop rather than in a well.

Mimosa Stephenson

University of Texas at Brownsville