Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John

by Sally Cline

First a serious poet and novelist, then a cause celebre, Radclyffe Hall was also a sometime feminist and a Catholic convert who believed in spiritualism Sally Cline uses new material to explore the connections between Hall's writings, life, and milieu, creating a biography that is both a signal contribution to women's studies and a marvelous read. 16 illustrations Author publicity .

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Research, Lesbian

434 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Meen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, what a life John lived. More than about her, though (she and Una and Souline and all the drama-rama got tedious after a while), I enjoyed the vision into a particular class of people at a particular time in history. And thinking about the struggle that lgbtq folks are going through for equality now, for all that was wrong with her, what Radclyffe Hall did in writing and releasing The Well of Loneliness was truly fucking courageous. This bio was pretty thorough, well researched, but some of the writing fell flat for me and at other times the tone was too conversational.

[Rosie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mixed thoughts… Not exactly complimentary. The writing style was pretty obnoxious, unnecessarily (unskillfully) verbose, postmodernist, and permeated with Freudian and postmodernist analyses I fervently disagreed with. As I was reading this book, I wrote the following:
“The writing style…Good God, the writing style.
“The pointless verbal flourishes…The unceasing rhetorical questions used as a device to change the subject, because the author is not skilled enough to smoothly change topic on her own…The run-on sentences…The word play…The heavy-handed employment of Freudian psychoanalysis…The fact that this could probably be cut down by a third if the author didn’t pointlessly describe things using at least five extra similes…The alliteration… Needless to say, the writing style is the absolute worse aspect of this book.”
And my judgement didn’t grow more sympathetic even after I finished the tome.
The author, despite claims to the contrary, is not a feminist theorist, or a lesbian feminist. She’s a gender theorist and totally enmeshed in the politics of gender studies, to the expense of true feminism.
It was, however, reasonably entertaining and informative. The writing style sometimes grew bearable for segments, and I forgot most of my annoyance when that happened (though it quickly came rushing back once one of those odious paragraphs appeared again). I’m not happy to be reminded that Hall nicknamed her (White Russian) lover Souline “Royal Chink Piggy”, though…How racist and degrading, speaking as a person with East Asian heritage. ‘But if it makes them happy…remember the historical context…’ Ugh.
Anyway, this biography isn’t really worth the read. If you want a Hall biography, try to find a better one. It’s well-researched and detailed, as other reviews hold, but the prose is grating. I’ll provide some quotations to give you a demonstration of what I mean, when it’s at its very worst.

Quotations:

“Ethel was the most famous lesbian involved in the pre-war suffrage campaign. Her own letters suggest that she had had an affair both with novelist Edith Somerville (1858–1949) and with Emmeline Pankhurst. If the latter were the case, it would put lesbianism at the heart of the suffrage movement. Smyth’s most significant gift to the movement was ‘The March of the Women’, a suffrage anthem which she conducted with a toothbrush from a window of her Holloway prison cell.” (79)
What??!! Emmeline Pankhurst??!! I would like to see from evidence for this….It’s interesting. I know a lot about the Pankhursts, but none of it includes any hints of lesbianism. This could, I suppose, be an example of Cline reading far too much into things and inferring things with no basis in reality.

“John overlooked the fact that Ladye’s motherliness had become inhibiting to her, that Ladye’s sexual appetites had been blunted by habit and illness, that her own intellectual capacities were outstripping her mentor’s. It was the death of her mother-lover she lamented; the fear that she had been responsible for that death with which she scourged herself. Once again as in her childhood she felt rejected and abandoned. She needed the understanding of Cara, the other daughter, ‘your loving Mummy’s Darling Child’.” (130)
The annoying Freudian tone and overreliance on its theories, possibly to the expense of an evenhanded approach…The use of the word “mother-lover”...These things I find grating. And by grating, I mean that it makes me want to drag my face across a cheese grater a dozen times. Or maybe someone else’s face?

“That Una could purposefully wish to embrace domesticity with a woman rather than with him was beyond his comprehension. That this particular woman’s image had transformed masculinity into a subversive and defiant desirability was beyond his imaginative grasp. A woman with an appearance as risque as Radclyffe Hall was a woman who took risks.” (138)
“Subversive and defiant desirability”...Ughhhh. It’s such a postmodernist way to phrase it. So meaningless. So antifeminist in its refusal to actually discuss the concrete, political meaning of these things in the real world and to criticize them.

“Holding the precious manuscript, John and Una, torn between nervousness and confidence, climbed to the top of a winding spiral staircase to reach Audrey’s cramped offices above London’s Burlington Arcade. Audrey knew she must size up not merely the novel in their hands, but also this already well-known, eccentric and litigious couple. Speedily she scanned a few pages. She liked what she saw on paper. She then had to consider the person. For she would be taking on not only this manuscript but also the handsome woman before her, with her neat head of hairy shiny with good hard brushing, her imposing carriage, her fierce eagle eyes, with their intense caged look – a look which could quickly become vulnerable. In accepting Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, she would need to accept also the complexity of someone who renamed herself John, with all that signified. Audrey realized quite quickly that she might have to deal with the vulnerability beneath the fierce facade, the sensitivity of the girl Marguerite beneath the dashing exterior of the woman John. The two were not likely to be separated in her writing. She would need careful handling if there were to be more novels after this one.” (184)
This is a good example of the author’s weak writing. She makes up stuff that has no actual evidence to make the book longer and provide more character descriptions. There are no footnotes, and this is so clearly an excuse to describe Hall and “creatively” imagine what might have happened, when in reality, Audrey was not thinking such things. I really hate it. This is a biography, not a novel.

“What they found threatening, John found intriguing: hundreds of young women publicly idolizing a sensationally sensual woman who smouldered through her stage parts.” (187)
Unnecessary, obnoxious alliteration. How did this survive the editing stage? It’s simply absurd.

“Romaine [Brooks], whose character Hall drew on for Venetia Ford, was both grey and never grey. She saw her life, which she considered hardly worth living, in terms of black and white. Yet her life itself, turbulent and troubled, was techni-coloured with emotion – indigo with passion, red-hot with torment, on green alert for the dangers that started, as John’s did, in her childhood. It was hardly surprising that her melancholy was monotone, as were her paintings.” (191)
This isn’t strictly postmodernist—it’s merely an attempt by Cline to describe Romaine’s personality and emotions with creativity—but it comes off as clumsy and infantile. Why indigo, red, and green? There’s no basis in reality here.

“The grey generalities of Romaine’s early life matched John’s, the damaging details left a similar mark.” (192)
This is quoted simply because it is just one example of the many run-on sentences scattered throughout this book. I understand some authors use it for artistic effect, but I don’t see the so-called “artistic effect” being in any way diminished if there was a semi colon, or a period, in place of that comma here.

“For Romaine, as for John, there was something romantic as well as highly sexual about dancing out their desire for another woman whilst attired in male clothing. This visual replication of heterosexuality within a lesbian relationship was bold, provocative. The sexual ambiguities, the erotic posturing, the veils and cloaks that could be thrown off to expose the hidden lusts, appealed to the writer to Hall, the artist in Romaine.” (194)
I would like to vomit…Not at the inherent meaning but simply the extremely annoying way Cline phrases this, the postmodern prioritization of playfulness, oppositions, paradox, stretching of meaning, disguises, etc., in its interpretations. It’s so trite and really damaging to actual meaningful change.

“Newman Flower asked John to produce more short stories. In an age of excess, an age of satire, an age of exotic intimacy [hah?????! Give us five more examples of what kind of age it was, won’t you, Cline?], Radclyffe Hall scoured its grimy underside, prodded its dark belly. [This sentence could be like 13 words shorter…] She chose a new framework for her stories, focusing on the doomed side of people’s natures and their desperate search for spiritual fulfilment.” (198)

“Was she only thinking of her own possible future? Or was it the painful privilege of her inner ‘seeing-eye’ which made her unable not to see suffering everywhere, and to intensify it where it existed? Pain, need and fear, whether in animals or people, always called forth her strongest responses. This could make her a taxing companion.
“Seeing birds trapped in tiny cages, John had paid to release them. Seeing beaten dogs, she had taken them home and cosseted them until their whimpers ceased. What could she do now for Vere? Nothing, except stand by her side, as her friend’s whimpers increased and her writing diminished.” (206)
In just two paragraphs, we see two examples of a very grating shortcut of Cline’s: She asks a rhetorical question to the reader, then answers it, as a way to transition to a new topic or bring up a new subject. Once or twice, it’s not so bad, but when it’s used as frequently as Cline uses it, it drives the reader mad. The reader is me. I’m in a psych-ward now. And I think I’ve actually encountered this before in another book that’s writing style I despised…I think a biography of Constance Wilde. I’ll check that later, but it’s disappointing this is a problem that crops up in biographies more than once.

“To Cubby [the daughter of Una, Una being Hall’s lover] the place was like a house of cards. Occupants were reshuffled so often and the location changed so frequently that sometimes at the end of a term with the King, Queen and assorted Jacks ever moving on, she hardly knew which house she was going back to. Like a well-brought up Chesire Cat she kept on smiling as she resettled herself and her schoolbooks somewhere new, but often inside she must have felt as uncertain and wide-eyed as Alice.” (207)
Wow…This Lewis Caroll allegory is really unnecessary and irrelevant, discarded after a paragraph, and gives the reader the impression the author can tell the reader’s attention is wandering and is trying desperately to make the writing more engaging…failing miserably and instead conveying infantile incompetence at writing. (...Whoops, that was alliteration, wasn’t it? Sorry….)

“That night, in martyred mood, John asked Una to read aloud the unpublished parts of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the long poem he had written in Reading Gaol.” (239)
So, I’m not sure if this is supposed to be some sort of metaphor about art and De Profundis being deep and poetic, but De Profundis was not a poem. It was a letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas. The poem he wrote in prison was The Ballad of Reading Gaol. If this is intentional and meant to be playful nonsense, then it’s extremely stupid and likely to confuse to the uninformed audience, but based on context (this is a quick passing mention), I think this might be a genuine mistake—one disappointing to find in a literary biography. It could be corrected using just a single Google search.

“She [Una] had not grasped the very different meaning the trial had had for John. The bravado with which they fixed their colours to the mast and flaunted them had indeed drawn them closer together. For John, however, that shared stimulation was less a symbol of future unity than a present, as erotically irresistible as sex – possibly, after fourteen years together, more irresistible. It was sex.” (276)
Uh, no, it wasn’t? Sex is physical copulation…I know what she’s trying to do, but this is dumb.

“Virginia Woolf’s book [A Room of One’s Own] was based on two lectures delivered in October 1928 to young women at Girton and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge, many of whom had copied Hall’s Eton-cropped hairstyle. Woolf’s heroine, Judith Shakespeare, the dramatist’s fictional sister, had been identified as Radclyffe Hall. Virginia’s academic audience would have known that Radclyffe Hall claimed descent from Shakespeare’s daughter and that some supporters of Hall had tried to use Shakespeare’s Sonnets as evidence in the trial.
“Shakespeare’s sister becomes the oppressed woman artist in any age but, in the context of the times in which Woolf was speaking, she also becomes ‘Radclyffe Hall’. Woolf tried to achieve two things: to connect non-feminist lesbians like Radclyffe Hall’s circle and Vita Sackville-West with women’s political cause, but also to link all women with the suffering of lesbians.” (282)
This is brand new to me, but I find it very interesting! It’s surprising I didn’t know, considering how much feminist theory I’ve read, including an actual anthology of feminist criticism of Woolf.

“The two writers however had one thing in common. Like John, Virginia felt she was not quite one thing or another. Virginia, ‘not a man nor a woman’, used this notion creatively in her fictional biography. Orlando, inhabiting two gender worlds, highlights Virginia’s own dilemmas. But where Virgina had concerns about her sexual identity, John had concerns about her gender identity. John loved and emulated the power of men but she distrusted their destructiveness. The burdens of the past would always trigger some confusions [if Cline is referring to their shared history of childhood sexual abuse, she should state so plainly, referring to their PTSD or simply trauma, rather than envoke the substanceless term ‘confusions’, with its lack of culpability and failure to name the horrific reality of what they experienced at the hands of abusive males] for her as they did for Virginia Woolf. But unlike Woolf, Hall the spiritual realist either fiercely stamped them out, shut them down, or let God deal with them. She was God’s creature. He would know what to do with her and others like her, even if the world did not.” (284)
Whooey patooey gender studies postmodernist dog dooey.

“Leonard [Woolf] impatiently assured her [Virginia Woolf] that it went on at his school: ‘It was the most corrupt place I’ve ever been in.’ Even Leonard, liberal champion of The Well, called school homosexuality ‘corrupt’.” (284)
Cline seems to be unable to see past the context of Leonard’s judgement here. While it is likely, or almost guaranteed, that he had prejudices against homosexuality, the homosexuality that went on in boys’ boarding schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not equitable, romantic, loving, etc. It can’t be equated to the homosexual relationships that naturally spring up outside of these structured environments, with their cultures of bullying and exploitation. I haven’t done much research into this subject, my information obtained solely from passing mentions, but even I know about the violence, the rape (as in men’s prisons), the practice of “fagging”, the exploitation of younger students by older ones, and all the, yes, corruption that was present in these environments, enmeshed into the culture and passed down to younger students in a perpetual cycle of abuse. So, I don’t think it’s fair to simplify Leonard’s statement to “Leonard . . . called school homosexuality ‘corrupt’”, with its implicit criticism of his “bigoted” statement. There’s more going on here than is visible at first glance.

“What intrigued John from their very first meeting was Evguenia’s mysteriousness; the mystery both fascinated her and irritated her profoundly. Souline, the text, was often indecipherable. John could not translate her, though she felt that their souls were in close conspiracy.” (312)
Here’s an example of the odious postmodernist practice of transforming people and actions in the real world into “text[s]” that must be “decipher[ed]”. I’m not necessarily a Marxist, but at this moment, I wish everyone was a Marxist (with their materialism, or however you call it), so I wouldn’t have to read nonsense like this ever again!

“John did of course cut her allowance. Half angry with Souline, half angry with herself, she invented a new rule. If Souline agreed to live and work in the same county as John she would continue to receive £250 a year. If she refused, it would be cut to £100 a year. Even that was dependent on her always letting John know ‘honestly’ her address. This harsh game of control and evasion had become a ritualized contest. Even the allowance nowadays represented a complex interplay of ownership and fear of ownership, submission and fear of submission. The push and pull of money had become the currency of their love affair.” (366)
How insufferable…No, it didn’t represent a “complex interplay of ownership and fear of ownership, submission and fear of submission”. It didn’t represent anything. There’s no representation here. There’s simply grotesque reality. It was an example of the way John manipulated Souline and used money to control her. There was no “game” here. There was no “ritualized contest”. God, I freaking hate postmodernists. Do you hate reality so much that you must make up deceptive, corrosive nonsense to make your book more, in your opinion, interesting?

[Sharon Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a writer whose lasting fame, such as it is, rests on one book published in 1928, Radclyffe Hall punches well above her weight as a biographee. Sally Cline's is the fourth one I've read but there are at least 2 others!

I liked Cline's biography for two main reasons: her portraits of other prominent lesbian activists and personalities in the 1920s and 1930s, which reads like The Gay Girl's Guide to Lesbian London, and the research she did into the life and personality of Evguenia Souline, Hall's last passionate attachment. No biographer before Cline seems to have bothered to look up Souline's friends and associates or read the memoir she left of her time with Hall. Cline therefore presents a much more balanced portrait of her, in contrast to the negativity of Troubridge's memoir and Michael Baker's Our Three Selves, the first full-length biography. Troubridge (Hall's life-partner) virtually slanders her; Cline takes issue with Troubridge and convincingly fleshes Souline out, showing that she wasn't just a manipulative minx, after Hall's money; she returned Hall's love and valiantly tried to assert her right to an independent life when Hall used her money to try to tie her down.

Cline's portrait of Hall's relationships, passionate and otherwise, with women who were part of lesbian London and Paris presents a vivid picture of the times and milieux frequented by Hall and her partners, Mabel Batten and, later, Una Troubridge. Hall seemed to know them all - Colette (whose gay Claudine novels pre-dated the Well of Loneliness), salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, Australian novelist Ida Wylie, American theatre stars Teddie Gerard and Tallulah Bankhead and many, many more! Cline presents Hall as a woman deeply involved in the society of her day and keen on becoming a famous writer.

Many criticise Hall for her "towering ego", but it is probably this quality as much as anything else that enabled her to weather the storm that broke over The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928 at the height of her literary fame and subject to a trial for obscenity - so absurd an allegation that prominent authors, even those who disliked her or condemned her style, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, rose to defend her. None of their testimony was allowed in court, however; the book was banned in England and nearly banned in the United States. It is, I believe, still selling.

Hall is a compelling subject and Cline's biography vividly reveals her complex character. I strongly recommend it.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very informative. However, at times it seemed too informative. There was a lot of excess information pertaining to other women who simply did not have much significance in Radclyffe Hall's personal life or career. Other than that, it was very good.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book with tons of details about the life, loves, and friends of Radcliffe Hall.

[Annette Kane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough, well researched, in depth

[Laurel Faulk · Rating 5 out of 5]

intruiging book, author put her all into her research of Radclyffe Hall