Radclyffe Hall by Richard Dellamora

The Well of Loneliness (1928) is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written; though it contains no explicit sex, a British court declared it obscene, and its fame has eclipsed Radclyffe Hall's other novels and poetry. Richard Dellamora offers the first full reading of Hall's published and unpublished fiction, poetry and autobiography, showing how she reworked her own life to fashion her identity and help create a public lesbian culture. He revises truisms drawn from Una Troubridge's memoirs, considers Hall's engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis, Spiritualism, Theosophy and mysticism, and presents a woman who reconciled her life with Troubridge with affairs with other women, and experimental ideas of gender with conservative politics and Catholicism.