Radclyffe Hall: The Scandalous Life Behind Britain's Most Banned Novel
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Most people who've heard of Radclyffe Hall know exactly one fact about her: she wrote The Well of Loneliness, and the British government banned it for being obscene. That trial is real, and it mattered. But it was actually the second time in Hall's life that a court was asked to decide whether she was, in the words used both times, "a grossly immoral woman." The first case came eight years earlier, grew out of her secret hobby investigating psychics, and has been almost entirely forgotten. So has most of the rest of her life: the fortune she inherited at 21, the two women she loved in overlapping, tangled succession, and the will she left behind that quietly punished the second of them for loving her too.
Money, an Absent Family, and a Name That Wasn't Quite Hers
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born in Bournemouth in 1880 to a wealthy, largely absent family. Her parents divorced when she was two, and she grew up more or less unloved by her volatile mother, who remarried a singing teacher named Alberto Visetti a decade later. Hall disliked her stepfather intensely, and according to her biographer Michael Baker, he made sexual advances toward her as she grew up, on top of offering her little encouragement despite her own evident musical talent.
At 21 she inherited a substantial trust left by her grandfather, Charles Radclyffe-Hall, which meant she never had to earn a living and could spend her twenties doing more or less as she pleased. What she pleased, for a while, was writing poetry and having it set to music, publishing volumes like Twixt Earth and Stars before she ever wrote a novel. She'd also already had her first serious attachment to a woman years earlier, to a singer named Agnes Nicholls who boarded with her mother, long before anyone she'd later become famous for loving. In adulthood she started calling herself John rather than Marguerite, adopting a strikingly masculine wardrobe of cropped hair, monocles, bow ties and smoking jackets that she kept for the rest of her life. The pen name she wrote under, and eventually the persona she lived under, was itself lifted from her father's name.
Ladye
In 1907, at a spa in Germany, the 27-year-old Hall met Mabel Batten, a well-known amateur singer 24 years her senior, married with an adult daughter and grandchildren. They fell for each other quickly. After Batten's husband died, the two women moved in together, and it was Batten who gave Hall the nickname John, reportedly because she reminded her of a male ancestor in a family portrait. Hall used the name for the rest of her life. Batten, known affectionately as Ladye, also introduced Hall to a wider circle of artistic, intellectual and largely lesbian women in London, and encouraged her to start submitting her poetry for publication properly.
The Ghost-Hunting Case Nobody Remembers
What's less well known is that Hall spent a chunk of the 1910s taking amateur psychical research seriously, investigating mediums and claims of the supernatural through the Society for Psychical Research, the same body that had earlier drawn interest from figures like Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1920, seeking election to the society's governing council, Hall ran into a member named St John Lane Fox-Pitt, who publicly objected to her candidacy and, in doing so, described her as "a grossly immoral woman." Fox-Pitt wasn't a random critic. He was the son-in-law of the Marquess of Queensberry, the same aristocrat whose accusations against Oscar Wilde had led to Wilde's trial and imprisonment two decades earlier, and by most accounts he was using the same playbook. Hall sued him for slander and won. It's a strange footnote today, mostly because it reads like a dry run for the much more famous trial that would follow her novel eight years later, right down to the specific phrase the court was asked to rule on.
Two Women, One Grave
Hall met Una Troubridge, Batten's cousin, in 1915. Troubridge was a sculptor married to Vice-Admiral Ernest Troubridge and mother to a young daughter, and she and Hall fell for each other while Batten, by then in poor health with hypertension and circulatory problems, was still alive and still Hall's partner. It's a detail Hall's own diaries don't shy away from: in January 1918, not long after Batten's death, Troubridge recorded Hall telling her, in effect, that she'd married them both, one after the other, without ever quite letting go of the first.
Batten died in 1916, and Hall had her body embalmed with a silver crucifix, blessed by the Pope, placed on the corpse. The following year, Hall and Troubridge moved in together, undeterred by the Catholic Church's teaching on same-sex relationships, which Hall, a convert, otherwise took seriously alongside a lifelong parallel interest in spiritualism and reincarnation. Troubridge's desertion of an admiral for another woman was, unsurprisingly, a minor society scandal in its own right, years before either of them became famous for anything literary.
A Bestseller Before the Scandal
It's easy to assume Hall was a one-book novelist who got lucky, or unlucky, with subject matter. She wasn't. By the mid-1920s she'd already published several well-received novels, and her fourth, Adam's Breed, a story about an Anglo-Italian waiter turned hermit, won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1926 or 1927, two of the most prestigious literary awards in Britain at the time. She was, in other words, an established and respected mainstream novelist two years before she published the book that would define her reputation for the following century.
The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness came out in July 1928, telling the story of Stephen Gordon, an upper-class Englishwoman whose attraction to women is apparent from childhood and who Hall, drawing on the sexologist Havelock Ellis's language, described as a "congenital invert." The novel contains no sexual content by any reasonable modern standard. That didn't stop the Sunday Express editor James Douglas from launching a public campaign against it that August, at one point writing that he'd rather give a healthy child a vial of poison than the book. The publisher, panicked, sent the manuscript to the Home Secretary for an opinion, got a bad one, and pulled UK publication, though copies kept arriving from a French printing until customs seized them and the case went to Bow Street Magistrates' Court that November.
Hall wasn't the one on trial; the charges were brought against her publisher and a London bookseller, and she wasn't called to testify, though she attended court every day and sold her own London house to help cover the defence's legal costs. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster both agreed to appear as defence witnesses, though the magistrate refused to let anyone testify about the book's literary merit, which made the gesture largely symbolic.
George Bernard Shaw turned the invitation down with a line that's better remembered than almost anything said in the courtroom itself, joking that he was too immoral to make a credible witness for the defence. It didn't matter in the end. The magistrate ruled the book obscene and ordered it destroyed, and an appeal failed a month later. It wasn't republished in the UK until 1949, six years after Hall's own death, once postwar attitudes had shifted enough for Falcon Press to reissue it without anyone bringing a fresh prosecution. Notably, other novels touching on lesbian relationships published that same year, including Woolf's own Orlando, were never prosecuted at all.
The book fared differently in the United States. New York police seized around 800 copies not long after its American publisher, Alfred Knopf, brought it out, and a court initially found Knopf guilty of selling material that would "debauch public morals." An appeals court overturned that verdict in 1929, and the ruling let the novel circulate freely well before Britain caught up. It sold more than 50,000 copies in the US within the first few months of that decision, and by the time Hall died in 1943 it had been translated into eleven languages and sold over a million copies worldwide, banned or not.
The Pattern Repeats
In 1934, Troubridge fell ill with enteritis while she and Hall were on a trip to France, and the couple hired a nurse to help her recover. The nurse was Evguenia Souline, a 32-year-old White Russian refugee who'd fled the revolution over a decade earlier. Hall, then 54, fell hard for her almost immediately, in what amounts to an almost exact repeat of how she'd first fallen for Troubridge nearly two decades earlier, while caring for a different unwell partner. Troubridge, for her part, tolerated the affair without ever really accepting it, asking only that Hall remain faithful to her in what she called the fullest and ultimate sense of the word, whatever comfort that distinction actually offered. The three women lived together for a time in Florence before the outbreak of the Second World War forced them back to Britain, where they settled in Devon. Hall wrote Souline hundreds of letters over the following nine years.
A Complicated, Uglier Turn
It's worth being upfront about the least flattering part of Hall's later life rather than skating past it. Through the late 1930s, by multiple accounts, she held right-wing views that shaded into neo-fascist and antisemitic territory, a stance that sits uncomfortably against her own lifelong experience of being persecuted for who she was. It's not a detail every retelling of her life includes, but it's a documented part of it, and it complicates any tidy narrative about her as a straightforward pioneer.
The Deathbed Will
Hall was diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancer in early 1943 and died that October, with Troubridge at her bedside. She'd apparently wanted her final, unfinished novel destroyed, since too much of her pain over Souline had gone into it, and Troubridge honoured that request. In an earlier version of her will, Hall had left Souline a modest income. Very close to the end, she revoked it, leaving her entire estate, including all copyrights to her books, to Troubridge, with only a vague instruction that Troubridge should make whatever provision for Souline she saw fit at her own discretion. Troubridge's idea of discretion turned out to be minimal; by one account, in one particular year, it amounted to a five-pound note sent as a Christmas gift. When Souline was later dying of cancer herself, Troubridge reportedly refused to help with her medical costs. She also destroyed most of Souline's letters to Hall, kept Hall's own suits and had them altered to fit her, wore them for the rest of her life, and, in a 1945 biography of Hall she wrote herself, worked hard to minimise Souline's place in the story entirely. Hall was buried at Highgate Cemetery in London, in the same vault as Mabel Batten, not Troubridge, who outlived her by two decades and was eventually buried in Italy under the epitaph "Friend of Radclyffe Hall."
What's Left of Her Story
Britain's ban on The Well of Loneliness lifted in 1959, and the novel has been in more or less continuous print since, still regularly cited as the first widely read English novel to put a lesbian relationship at its centre and ask, however earnestly, for its readers' tolerance. Hall shared that era's persecution with plenty of other queer writers and performers who never got a comparable place in the historical record, among them Eve Adams, who ran a lesbian salon in Greenwich Village around the same years Hall was fighting her own battles in London and paid a far steeper price for it. Hall's own reputation, by contrast, survived intact enough that a novel the British government tried to have physically destroyed is the reason most people have heard her name at all, nearly a century later.
