Radclyffe "John" Hall

Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall (12 August 1880 – 7 October 1943) was an English poet and author, best known for her ground-breaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.

Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall was born in Bournemouth in1880 to Radclyffe ("Rat") Radclyffe-Hall (1846-1898) and Mary Jane Sager (née Diehl). Hall's father was a wealthy philanderer, educated at Eton and Oxford but seldom working, since he inherited a large amount of money from his father, an eminent physician who was head of the British Medical Association. Her mother was an American widow from Philadelphia, who struggled with her mental health. In 1882, Radclyffe abandoned his wife and daughter, although he did leave a sizable inheritance to provide for her in his absence. Her mother soon remarried, but Marguerite did not get on with her stepfather and the couple had an unhappy marriage. Marguerite had always had a difficult relationship with her mother, who made no secret of the fact that she had tried and failed to abort Marguerite and had no desire for children. She also often frittered away her daughter’s money for her own uses.

As Hall aged and became more independent, she realized that she had enough inheritance money from her father to live without working or marrying. She began to please herself, dressing in typical men's fashion of the times, such as trousers, monocles and hats. 

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In modern parlance, Hall would be considered a lesbian, but she described herself as a "congenital invert", a term taken from the writings of Havelock Ellis and other contemporary sexologists. Without a job, she passed her twenties pursuing women whom eventually left her and married.

In 1907, at the Bad Homburg spa in Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten, a well-known amateur singer. Batten (nicknamed "Ladye") was 51 year and a married grandmother. Although Hall was just 27, the pair fell in love and when Batten's husband died, they moved in together. Batten introduced Hall to a circle of artistic and intellectual women, many of them lesbians. She was also the first to call Hall "John", after noting her resemblance to one of Hall's male ancestors, a name which Hall used for the rest of her life. It was Batten who first encouraged Hall to look into publishing her writing.

In 1915, Hall fell in love with Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge (1887–1963), an artist who was married with a young daughter. This obviously caused tension with Batten, who died in 1916. Upon her death, Hall had Batten's corpse embalmed (odd?) and a silver crucifix blessed by the pope laid on it. Hall, Batten and Troubridge were "undeterred by the Church's admonitions on same-sex relationships” and Hall reconciled Catholicism with her belief in spiritualism and reincarnation." In 1917, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge began living together. Troubridge and Hall’s romance endured until Hall’s death.

Hall's most well-known work is The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928,. It tells the story of Stephen Gordon, a masculine lesbian who, like Hall herself, identifies as an "invert". The novel paints a vulnerable, sympathetic portrayal of lesbians, and shows that people using assumed masculine names etc. is not a modern phenomenon. Although The Well of Loneliness is not sexually explicit, it was nevertheless the subject of an obscenity trial in the UK, which resulted in an order for the destruction of all copies of the book. The United States allowed its publication only after a long court battle. The Well of Loneliness was number seven on a list of the top 100 lesbian and gay novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999. It is now noted as the predecessor to the golden age of lesbian pulp fiction.

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After period of travel and education, Hall published five books of poetry between 1906 and 1915.

Hall's first novel was The Unlit Lamp, published in 1924. It follows Joan Ogden, a young girl who dreams of setting up a flat in London with her friend Elizabeth (a so-called Boston marriage) and studying to become a doctor, but feels trapped by her manipulative mother's emotional dependence on her. Its length and grimness made it a difficult book to sell, so Hall deliberately chose a lighter theme for her next novel, a social comedy entitled The Forge (1924). The Forge was a modest success. The Unlit Lamp, which followed it into print, was the first printed with her name simply as Radclyffe Hall.

There followed another comic novel, A Saturday Life (1925), and then Adam's Breed (1926), a novel about an Italian headwaiter who, becoming disgusted with his job and even with food itself, gives away his belongings and lives as a hermit in the forest. The book's mystical themes have been compared to Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. It sold well, was critically acclaimed, and won both the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize, a feat previously achieved only by E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. In 1926, she published her first short story dealing with homosexuality. Twelve days later, she began writing The Well of Loneliness.

Hall published one novel after The Well of Loneliness. An anonymous verse lampoon titled The Sink of Solitude had appeared during the controversy over The Well. Although its primary targets were James Douglas, who had called for The Well's suppression, and the Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, who had started legal proceedings, it also mocked Hall and her book. One of the illustrations, which depicted Hall nailed to a cross, so horrified her that she could barely speak of it for years afterward. Her sense of guilt at being depicted in a drawing that she saw as blasphemous led to her choice of a religious subject for her next novel The Master of the House.

At Hall's insistence, The Master of the House was published with no cover blurb, which may have misled some purchasers into thinking it was another novel about "inversion". Advance sales were strong, and the book made No. 1 on The Observer's bestseller list, but it received poor reviews in several key periodicals, and sales soon dropped off. In the United States reviewers treated the book more kindly, but shortly after the book's publication, all copies were seized - not by the police, but by creditors; Hall's American publisher had gone bankrupt.

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Hall lived with Troubridge in London and, during the 1930s, in the small town of Rye, East Sussex, noted for its many writers. Hall also was involved in affairs with other women throughout the years, including the actress Ethel Waters.

On holiday around 1934, Troubridge contracted enteritis. Evguenia Souline, a Russian nurse, was hired to care for her. Hall and Souline ended up having an affair, which Troubridge knew about and painfully tolerated. It unsettled Troubridge deeply, but she remained with Hall.

In 1943, Hall was diagnosed with cancer of the rectum. Operations were unsuccessful and she died at the age of 63.