The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall was born in 1884 in Bournemouth in a house of horrors called 'Sunny Lawn'. It was an unhappy childhood, until her father's death when Radclyffe inherited GBP200,000. She was 18. She leased a London house, dressed in chappish clothes, called herself Peter then John & wrote her first collection of verse. She was a political reactionary, a reformed Catholic, obsessive about work, hunted with 3 packs, got her pipes from Dunhill's, wore brocade smoking jackets & had her hair cropped. She thought real women were born to be wives & disliked doing any business with them. Her 1st love was Mabel Batten, known as Ladye, who reputedly had an affair with Edward VII. Radclyffe Hall is now most famous for THE WELL OF LONELINESS, written in 1928. A novel about 'congenital inverts' - lesbian love - the book was suppressed both here & the US & caused Radclyffe to be put on trial under the Obscene Publications Act. Brilliantly written, this biography is a fresh and irreverent insight into the lives of one of the most alluring and eccentric women of this century.

'Diana Souhami's biography is fascinating and thorough. In style, substance, insight and wit it is by far the best thing anyone has written on the fateful life of Radclyffe Hall' Jeanette Winterson, THE TIMES 'So candid, so vivid, so tragicomic...outrageously entertaining' Victoria Glendinning, DAILY TELEGRAPH 'a fascinating account of a woman whose...novel became a landmark in the history of freedom of expression.' OBSERVER 'Diana Souhami has given us a gripping biography and a marvellous piece of social history.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Souhami's sympathetic but not uncritical biography treats its colourful, self-dramatising cast of eccentrics, toffs and spiritualists with a pleasing measure of irony.' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

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