Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing by Richard Dellamora (review)

Radclyffe Hall may have been one of the most privileged British women novelists of the modernist era, but money cannot buy a lasting place in the public consciousness. The shadow of Hall's contemporary, Virginia Woolf—who was poorer and struggled to support herself through the kinds of reviewing and other literary journalism to which Hall never needed to resort—haunts Richard Dellamora's superb new study, Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. Unlike Hall, Woolf looms large in readers' minds with a complex, multifaceted presence that combines biography and aesthetic achievement. Ask an educated reader what he or she knows about Woolf, and a long list of facts comes tumbling out: she killed herself; she was part of the Bloomsbury group; she was a feminist who coined the phrase "a room of one's own"; she employed stream-of-consciousness narrative in To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931); she was bisexual/asexual/lesbian/heterosexual; she created Orlando, who is first a man, then a woman; she wrote about shell-shock in Mrs. Dalloway (1925); the list goes on.

As an admirer of Radclyffe Hall, Richard Dellamora must confront the unhappy fact that she survives in the public's memory—if at all—through only two pieces of information: she wrote The Well of Loneliness (1928), which is often described as the first novel in English to defend lesbian love, and her novel was banned in Britain as obscene. Scholars who have undertaken earlier studies of Hall have made the situation worse by focusing solely on her biography (especially on her relations with her female partners), while paying little attention to her other writings or to her self-construction as a writer, essentially reinforcing her invisibility outside of a specific political context. In Dellamora's view, Hall was, though conservative in some of her social attitudes, always "a modern, not a reactionary" and an innovator who should be celebrated for experimenting in a range of genres that connected her to the history of modernism in multiple ways (p. xv). It is his "challenge" here to avoid the simplistic image of Hall "predetermined by the novelistic narratives of the biographers, with their familiar cast of characters and the banal moral inferences that they invite" (p. 5). Liberating her from the cage constructed by well-meaning supporters and presenting her as more than a one-book author associated with a scandal, Dellamora succeeds in recasting Hall as a complex figure whose ambitions and accomplishments included, yet also went beyond, advocacy for same-sex marriage in The Well of Loneliness.

The multi-dimensional Hall who emerges from this approach is often unrecognizable to those accustomed to regarding her merely as a victim, mauled by the British justice system for her out-spokenness. Dellamora unearths the middlebrow Hall who penned the lyrics of "The Blind Ploughman," one of the better-known songs of the World War I era and a favorite in parlors and concert halls alike. So, too, he uncovers Hall the highbrow Aesthetic-movement poet who, like her Victorian predecessors Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (the lesbian couple who wrote as "Michael Field"), combined in her verse both Hellenism and a "body-centered, gender-crossing rhetoric of ecstasis and conversion" associated with "medieval Catholicism" (p. 170). Equally unexpected is Hall the devotee of spiritualism and theosophy, whose concern with the oneness of being extended to a deep identification with animals—an affinity that exceeded the usual clichés about early twentieth-century lesbian writers' relations with their pets and that helps to explain the vividly drawn, anthropomorphized animal characters that populate The Well of Loneliness. Dellamora even revives the Hall who, near the end of her writing career, dabbled in popular romantic fiction with The Sixth Beatitude (1936), although, as he convincingly suggests, Hall still employed "opposite-sex sexual desire to interweave male virility, female fecundity, and same-sex desire in ways that undermine the novel's heterosexual publicity" (pp...