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Radclyffe Hall Diana Souhami. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998. 418 pp. £20.00
SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Lady Una Troubridge's biography of her long-time lover, Marguerite ("John") Radclyffe Hall, in 1961, there have been six books on Hall including Sally Cline's Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (1997). Diana Souhami has now produced another life and times of Radclyffe Hall (RH) which provides a detailed account of the British government's absurd legal efforts to ban her tepid semiautobiographical lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Where Souhami's study also differs from Cline's work is in her delineation of the dreadful Una's role in the life and career of RH. Both were irritating eccentrics, self-indulgent, arrogant, racist, anti-semitic, and great admirers of Mussolini's and Hitler's fascism.
RH was born in 1880 to wealthy (and bizarre) parents whose marriage was failing. Her mother didn't want the child and not only tried to abort the foetus, but kept reminding her daughter that she was unwanted throughout her childhood and adolescence. Since her parents divorced not long after her birth, RH hardly knew her father and had to endure her philandering step-father who, she claimed, sexually abused her. At the age of eighteen, she achieved independence from her ghastly parents when she inherited over £100,000 from her father and, dressing as a man and assuming the name "John," began a life of luxury as a "butch" type predatory lesbian. Her first great love was Mrs. Mabel ("Ladye") Batten, a well-endowed married woman old enough to be her mother, who at one time was one of Edward VII's mistresses. But even before her affair with Ladye, RH had become an autocratic and egotistical personality with great literary pretensions. Dyslexic, she was convinced that she was a literary "jeanious" and produced seven volumes of undistinguished verse and four novels of turgid prose before the publication of The Well of Loneliness in 1928. As Souhami and Cline note in their studies, RH's novels rated fairly positive reviews and had benefitted from the literary talents of Una Troubridge.
Una (a cousin of Ladye), who became part of RH's ménage à trois-a ménage which continued after Ladye's demise through expensive spiritual mediums-was the wife of Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge and the...