The Forge: Wars Come and Wars Go But the World Does Not Change

by Radclyffe Hall

She was born Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall in 1880 to wealthy parents who separated while she was still an infant. Her parents thereafter paid little attention to her. Hall was educated privately, and then at King's College London. Later she travelled to Europe, settling in Dresden, Germany. By now she had inherited a vast fortune from her paternal grandfather and was able to live as she pleased. In Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten and fell in love despite the twenty-three year age difference. Batten gave Hall the nickname 'John' by which she was henceforward known in every circumstance throughout her life except in her work as an author. In 1915, Hall met and, in 1917 moved in with sculptor Una Troubridge, with whom she would remain for the rest of her life. Hall wrote poetry all throughout her twenties and thirties. She had published Dedicated to Arthur Sullivan as early as 1894, and five further volumes of collected work (including 'Twixt Earth and Stars in 1906, A Sheaf of Verses in 1908, Poems of the Past and Present in 1910 and Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems in 1913) were released before she stopped writing poetry and published her first novel in 1924. This was The Forge. That same year also saw publication of The Unlit Lamp, the first work for which Hall was known as simply Radclyffe Hall. The Well of Loneliness, the most important novel of Hall's career, was published in 1928 to immediate sensation and controversy. It is Hall's most direct artistic expression of her own personal sexual orientation. After the controversy of The Well of Loneliness, Hall would publish only two more novels: The Master of the House in 1932 and The Sixth Beatitude in 1936. She also released a collection of short stories - Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself in 1934. After years spent travelling in Italy and France and a series of long lasting affairs with other women (of which Troubridge was apparently aware), Hall retired with Troubridge to Rye, a small town in East Sussex. Hall, suffering from tuberculosis, underwent surgeries on her eyes and she thereafter had difficulty reading and writing. On October 7, 1943, Radclyffe Hall died from colon cancer at the age of sixty-three. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London near the gravesite of Mabel Batten.

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall (12 August 1880 – 7 October 1943) was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.

In the drawing rooms of Edwardian society, Marguerite made a small name as a poet and librettist. In 1907, she met a middle-aged fashionable singer, Mrs. Mabel Batten, known as 'Ladye", who introduced her to influential people. Batten and Radclyffe Hall entered into a long-term relationship. But before Batten died in 1916, Radclyffe Hall, known in private as 'John', had taken up with the second love of her life, Una, Lady Troubridge, who gave up her own creative aspirations (she was the first English translator of the French novelist Colette) to manage the household which she shared with 'John' for 28 years. With Batten, Radclyffe Hall converted to Catholicism; in the company of Una, she pursued an interest in animals and spiritualism. In later life, Radclyffe Hall chased after a younger woman named Evguenia Souline, a White Russian refugee. She died from cancer of the colon in October 1943.
As Radclyffe Hall (no hyphen; prefixed neither by 'John' nor 'Marguerite'), she published a volume of stories, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1934), which describes how British society utilised 'masculine' women during the First World War and then dropped them afterwards, and a total of seven novels. However, the novel on which Radclyffe Hall's reputation rests primarily is The Well of Loneliness (1928).
The novel was successfully prosecuted for obscenity when if first came out, and remained banned in Britain until 1948. Vilified as 'the bible of lesbianism' by fire-and-brimstone reactionaries. In the seventies, the halcyon days of radical feminism, it was hailed as the first portrayal of a 'butch' woman.