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 Baer, Brian James and Yingmei Liu. “The Case of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of
Loneliness.” TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies (2022): n. pag.

This article explores the notion of queering translation in relation to Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
(1928), often described as the first lesbian novel, focusing on two key terms related to sexual identity, the
word queer, which was semantically unstable at this historical moment, and the quasi-scientific term invert.
Hall's provocative use of queer against the minoritizing invert, which presages queer critiques of
identitarian politics by several decades, complicates the field of sexuality in the novel, presenting special
challenges for translators. Those challenges are analyzed in the early French translation of the novel and in
later Chinese translations, from both Taiwan and mainland China.

 Bauer, Heike. “In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge and their
Dogs.” Gender & History (2022): n. pag.
 Lamontagne, Kathryn G.. “‘Our Three Selves:’ Radclyffe Hall and Mabel Batten’s Lived
Catholicism.” Ecclesial Practices (2022): n. pag.

For British Catholic women, conversion was an empowering choice for oneself, rather than a path towards
gaining institutionalized power. Lay female converts at the turn of the century were generally privileged,
with a worldly understanding of the role of women in British society. Many converts drew on the spirit of
female independence at the end of the 19th century to contest their place in British society. For some, their
social and financial capital offered an additional position of power from which to push on notions of
traditional Britishness and femininity. To have the freedom to choose conversion at all exemplifies this
feeling of bodily and mental autonomy rarely exhibited by many women during the late 19th century and
early 20th century. This article sheds new light on the expansiveness of the lived, lay Catholic experience in
Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the examples of Mabel Batten (1857–1916) and
Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943).

 Preda, Alina. “Boundaries and Desire: Censorship and the Articulation of Romantic Encounters
in the Works of Radclyffe Hall.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (2022): n. pag. 2022

Radclyffe Hall suscitated vigorous antagonistic reactions among her contemporaries, readers and critics
alike, through her rendering of same-sex romantic encounters, which often provoked heated disputes on
the literary stage and in society at large, ultimately leading to obscenity charges materialised in the banning
of the books under investigation. This article focuses on the articulation of love and desire between women
in the works that this author wrote and/or published in the 1920s, pointing to the narrative manifestation
of self-censorship, as well as to the workings of external censorship and to the effects of these personally
inflicted and socially imposed boundaries.

 Karschay, Stephan. “Decadent Echoes, the Language of Censorship and Radclyffe Hall’s The
Well of Loneliness.” Symbolism (2021): n. pag.

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 “Chapter 4 THE TABOO OF INVERSION Radclyffe Hall and Literary Censorship.” Dirty
Works (2021): n. pag.
 Sonzini, Valentina. “Orsa Maggiore, editrice di Radclyffe Hall.” Bibliothecae.it 10 (2021): 328-
351.

In 1946, the Edizioni dell’Orsa maggiore started to publish all the Radlyffe Hall’s books. The Author has
been censored in England and her first literary work, The Well of Loneliness, became an incredible success
(the first edition in England has been published in 1928 and in Italy in 1930 by the publisher Modernissima).
In Italy, Hall is known thanks to two traslators (both are linked to Gian Dauli and the publisher Corbaccio):
Annie Lami and, above all, Mimi Oliva Lentati (the leader of Editrice dell’Orsa maggiore). The present article
is about the little publisher Orsa and its brief, but very important for italian lesbian movement, history.

 Stokoe, Ash Kayte. “Sexological Discourses and the Self in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884)
and Radclyffe Hall’s the Well of Loneliness (1928).” Global Queer Politics (2021): n. pag.

This chapter examines the mobilization of sexological discourses of ‘inversion’ in Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus
and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. It argues that, given the temporal distance…

 “3. "A Writer of Misfits": John Radclyffe Hall and the Discourse of Inversion.” Female
Masculinity (2020): n. pag.

 Subedi, Shankar Nand. “Female Masculinity in Radclyffe Hall's Novel The Well of
Loneliness.” Molung Educational Frontier (2020): n. pag.

This paper aims to analyze Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness from the perspective of female
masculinity. For that purpose, it uses the concept of female masculinity developed by Judith Halberstam.
Seen from the angle of female masculinity forwarded by Habersham, the present paper comes to the
conclusion that masculinity falls into crisis as we compare it to how it was defined and understood
traditionally. Most of the female characters in the novel show boldness, strength and ability to face and
tackle different situations filled with danger and hopelessness. A young woman named Stephen Gordon
pursues her passions and embarks on her own subjective world. Her activities and choices are anomalous
to the established mores concerning the role and position of women. This is what goes against the
conventional paradigm of gender and supports the idea of subversive female masculinity.

 D’Stair, Sarah. ““That rare gift: perfect hands on a horse”: Radclyffe Hall’s eros of cross-species
communion.” Feminist Modernist Studies 3 (2020): 1 - 15.

ABSTRACT Scholars of Radclyffe Hall’s fiction have focused primarily on her advocacy for human gender
and sexual freedom; however, closer attention to human-animal connections in her work reveals concern
for equity across species lines as well. The Well of Loneliness (1928) in many ways challenges the human-
animal binary just as powerfully as it does gender and sexual binaries. By narrating multi-species
relationships marked by kinetic body play, the novel suggests that eroticism can be a harmonizing force
that traverses deeply-ingrained social boundaries between animals of all kinds. By examining the
protagonist’s interactions with her animal friends, I argue that Hall’s text privileges intimate, unspoken
gestures of body and voice over the more confining structures of human language. Hall also implements
grammatical constructs in animal scenes that open possibilities for co-forming, co-shaping
interrelationality, a narrative move that acknowledges and appreciates, rather than ignores, radical alterity
between species. Ultimately, I argue, Hall envisions a rehabilitative ecological vision for human and
nonhuman animals, writing all creatures as co-constitutive actors within the intimate spaces they share

2
 Arbuet Osuna, Camila. “«Preferiría verte (muerta) a mis pies». Eróticas maternas e infancias
butch en Radclyffe Hall.” (2020).

We will analyze the counterpoint versions of motherhood and butch childhoods in those novels by
Radclyffe Hall addressing “sexual inversion,” the lesbian bestseller The Well of Loneliness (1928) and The
Unlit Lamp (1924), which present significant differences regarding the conditions of possibility and the
misfortunes of a queer life. We will concern ourselves with the representations of maternal abjection, in
the light of the importance that Radclyffe assigns to this deeply disturbing erotic bond (whether aversion or
attraction) for the development of butch childhoods. We will argue that a careful reading of the perversions
of this bond makes clear that Radclyffe’s perspective –for all of its morality, sexual shame and desire to be
admitted within the privileges of heterosexuality– allows for a critique of exclusivist, monogamous, and
unconditional emotional pacts, as well as of the conception of happiness they give rise to

 Watts, Jarica Linn. “Of Dashes, Gashes, and Wounds: Radclyffe Hall and the Medieval Devotion of
"Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself".” Religion & Literature (2020): n. pag.
 Schneider, Ralf. “Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe: The Well of Loneliness.” (2020).
 Roche, Hannah Elizabeth. “3. STRANGE SOIL AND NOVEL GROUND: RADCLYFFE HALL’S
ROMANCE PLOTS.” (2019).
 Klein, Kathryn. “The Well of Inspiration: Radclyffe Hall and the Growth of Popular Lesbian Fiction
in America.” The Journal of Popular Culture (2019): n. pag.
 Stone, Aaron J.. “Taste and the Tasteful: Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and the Culture of Queer
Elitism.” Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (2019): n. pag.

This chapter considers Woolf's belief that 'high art' should deal only indirectly with sex (let alone queer
sex), and how this helped shape a culture of queer elitism among modernists. Stone uses Woolf's less
than enthusiastic involvement in Hall's obscenity trial to argue that she considered such reformist
literature as decidedly middlebrow

 MacNamara, Stephen R.. “Martyrdom and masculinity: ideology and masculine identity in the
work of Radclyffe Hall.” (2018).

This thesis explores the depiction of masculinity by one of literature’s most famous female masculine
writers, Radclyffe Hall. Chapters One and Two discuss two extremes in the reception of Hall’s work: one
a successful poem, ‘The Blind Ploughman’ (1913); and the other, The Master of the House (1932), a
novel that was a commercial and critical failure for Hall. Both ‘The Blind Ploughman’ and The Master of
the House depict spiritual, sensitive working class men who are different. While these texts are often
mentioned in Hall scholarship, they have rarely been discussed individually. Chapter One addresses the
impact of ‘The Blind Ploughman’ and its success as poem/song through association with the war
wounded and how this, in turn, influenced Hall’s depiction of damaged/different masculinity and its
relationship to homosexuality. Chapter Two explores Hall’s engagement with themes that were also
being explored by modernist writers, in particular D. H. Lawrence’s reimagining of the Christ story in his
novella, ‘The Escaped Cock’ (1928); the chapter argues that The Master of the House uses Christianity
to disguise the homoromantic subtext of the novel. In contrast, Chapter Three explores the more
familiar topic of female masculinity in relation to Hall, but instead of focusing on male masculine
identities, it presents evidence that Joan of Arc, one of history’s most famous crossdressing women,
was a female masculine role model for Hall. The influence of Joan of Arc is present both
in Hall’s understanding of her own female masculine identity and in the representation of her female
characters. The aim of all three chapters in this thesis is to present a new way of viewing Hall and her
work in order to demonstrate that she is more than just a writer of lesbian fiction

3
 Terradillos, Tina. “Le Sale comme ressort d'une éthique de l'altérité dans les romans de
Radclyffe Hall.” (2018).

Montrer comment Radclyffe Hall construit la notion de Sale dans ses romans et comment cette notion
affecte la relation aux autres et a soi des personnages. Proposer une rehabilitation de Radclyffe Hall et
de son oeuvre. Voir comment Radclyffe Hall propose une ethique de l'alterite qui s'appuie sur le Sale

Fine p. 2

 Hovey, Jaime E.. “Gallantry and its discontents: Joan of Arc and virtuous transmasculinity in
Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West.” Feminist Modernist Studies 1 (2018): 113 - 137.

ABSTRACT The medieval crossdressing warrior Joan of Arc became a popular figure during World War
I and its aftermath, appearing in silent films, political posters, plays, novels, and speculative
biographies. Her youthful idealism, chivalry, and courage associated her with young soldiers sacrificed
on the field of battle, and her canonization in 1920 made official the centuries-old veneration of her as a
virgin martyr. Modern figurations of Joan emphasize the ethical dimensions of her transmasculinity,
where queer gender identity and desire are actively engaged in the struggle to build a more tolerant
world. Looking at Cecil B. DeMille’s film Joan the Woman (1916), Radclyffe Hall’s novels The Unlit Lamp
(1924) and The Well of Loneliness (1928), and Vita Sackville-West’s biography Saint Joan of Arc (1936),
I argue that Joan’s chivalry and saintliness model an ethical transmasculine gender that emerges in
wartime, but gradually shows up elsewhere in modernism to insist on queer social justice, fighting “for
the good of all.

 Lane, Hannah M.. “Queer Citizenship: Lesbian and National Identities in Radclyffe Hall's "The
Well of Loneliness" and Compton Mackenzie's "Extraordinary Women".” (2018).

 “Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness (1928–29).” Homintern (2017): n. pag.

 Rose, James. “Sapphism and Gender in Virginia Woolf and Radclyffe Hall.” (2017).

 Turner, Ellen. “Anti-Fox Hunting, Female Novelists, and the First World War: Mary Webb's Gone
to Earth (1917), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and Winifred Holtby’s South
Riding (1936).” (2017).

 Roche, Hannah Elizabeth. “An ‘ordinary novel’: genre trouble in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of
Loneliness.” Textual Practice 32 (2016): 101 - 117.

ABSTRACT Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness has long been read as stylistically inferior to


novels by Hall's ‘experimental’ peers. Led by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the dominant opinion has,
to quote Terry Castle, sentenced Hall to a reputation of ‘bad, bad, bad’ writing. This article takes
issue with Hall's exclusion from modernism, raising questions about the relationship between
political radicalism and stylistic familiarity. Was Hall cleverly turning to a Victorian mode in order to
critique the politics of modernism, challenging the value of aesthetic experiment and obscurity? I
argue not only that The Well was stylistically as impressive as the most celebrated of ‘difficult’
1920s novels, but also that, by boldly appropriating an accepted (and heteronormative)
genre, Hall makes a statement about the rightful position of lesbian writing that dares to strike its
readers in ways more direct and profound than the audaciously avant-garde.

4
 Hill, Emily S.. “God’s Miserable Army: Love, Suffering, and Queer Faith in Radclyffe Hall’s The
Well of Loneliness.” Literature and Theology 30 (2016): 359-374.

 Funke, Jana. “'The World' and other unpublished works of Radclyffe Hall.” (2016).

 Terradillos, Tina. “Radclyffe Hall : de l’engagement à une ouverture éthique dans The Sixth
Beatitude.” (2016).

Partant du principe que l’engagement appelle son pendant, l’autonomie, et qu’Adorno a montre que les
deux termes n’entrent pas en opposition stricte mais forment les bornes d’une dialectique, cet article
examine comment Radclyffe Hall se positionne a l’interieur de cet intervalle moins dans Le puits de
solitude comme l’on pourrait s’y attendre, que dans The Sixth Beatitude. Dans ce roman, le traitement
de la pauvrete qui se manifeste a travers le motif du Sale exige une double negociation, d’une part avec
la realite telle que Hall entend la representer, d’autre part avec le lecteur auquel elle la soumet. La
technique de va-et-vient qui rapproche puis eloigne le lecteur de la realite est cependant remise en
cause par la precarite des personnages qui conduit a interroger la possibilite meme du choix a l’origine
de l’engagement et pose la question de l’agentivite. Malgre l’absence d’emprise des personnages sur le
reel, il apparaitra qu’ils n’en sont pas moins transgressifs et que leur transgression involontaire ouvre a
de nouvelles formes d’engagement qui inscrivent le jeu entre engagement et autonomie dans une
ethique de l’alterite ou la multiplicite et la collaboration prevalent sur les oppositions binaires

 Macpike, Loralee, Lori Lefkowitz, Michael Levine and Linda Smolak. “A Geography of Radclyffe
Hall's Lesbian Country.” (2016).

To what extent do sex and sexuality affect what writers write and how they write it? How might the
critic examine where and how sexuality complicates writing? Contemporary attempts to delineate
literary genderings and sexualities have made it impossible to consider literature apart from its writers'
assumptions, anxieties, and location regarding gender and sexuality. Yet, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
has pointed out, "[e]very single theoretically or politically interesting project of postwar thought has
finally had the effect of delegitimating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the multiple,
unstable ways in which people may be like or different from each other. "2 I believe current critical
interpretations of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness,3 which focus on Stephen Gordon's sexuality
as the "meaning" of the book, do indeed delegitimate critical space by disallowing the "multiple,
unstable ways" in which people may be both alike and different. To expand this critical space, I want to
examine Stephen Gordon's sexuality

Fino p. 3 inclusa

 Abt, Anne. “Apply Here for Full Access to Radclyffe Hall At The Well Of Loneliness A.” (2016).

 Luksh, Isabella. “Reading and reassessing the construction of gender and sexuality in Radclyffe
Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography.” (2016).

 Reynier, Christine. “Exploring the Modernist State of England Novel by Women Novelists:
Rebecca West, Radclyffe Hall and Winifred Holtby.” (2015).

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Cet article se concentre sur trois romancieres britanniques des annees 1920 et 1930, Rebecca
West, Radclyffe Hall et Winifred Holtby, et sur trois de leurs romans. Alors que South Riding (1936) de
Holtby semble correspondre a la definition du roman victorien dit « Condition of England novel », les
autres sont plus difficiles a saisir. South Riding offre en effet une description satirique de l’Angleterre
de l’entre-deux-guerres et se confronte directement aux problemes socio-politiques du moment. The
Return of the Soldier (1918) de West evoque pour sa part, comme le titre le suggere, le retour d’un
veteran et a ete essentiellement analyse comme une etude pionniere du « Shell Shock » ou obusite et
de l’experience traumatisante de la Premiere Guerre mondiale. Adam’s Breed (1926) de Radclyffe Hall a
quant a lui, ete eclipse par le scandale de la publication de The Well of Loneliness (1928) et le proces
qui suivit tant et si bien qu’il compte parmi les romans oublies du debut du vingtieme siecle. Cet article
tente de montrer que ces romans qui portent sur l’etat de l’Angleterre sont des « State of England
novels » mais d’une nouvelle sorte. Sous couvert de s’interesser a l’experience traumatisante de la
Premiere Guerre, les romans de West et Hall analysent leur propre societe. Tout en adoptant une
technique narrative differente de celle du roman victorien dit « Condition of England novel », tout en
s’inspirant du « roman sur l’etat de l’Angleterre » d’E. M. Forster (ou en le critiquant), tout en s’eloignant
du type de satire pratique par Holtby (qu’elles rejoignent pourtant dans une certaine mesure), ces
romancieres offrent, depuis leur propre arriere-plan social et leur point de vue privilegie, leur vision de la
richesse et de la pauvrete, des classes sociales, de la condition des femmes ou des immigres. Dans
l’ensemble, elles repensent le role de la guerre et des femmes tout en evaluant l’etat de l’Angleterre et
en mettant a nu les mecanismes de la societe anglaise de leur temps. Il s’agit ici de relire, voire de
reevaluer, ces romans et de montrer comment, de maniere a la fois originale et comparable, ils
reinventent le genre du « Condition or State of England novel » : references intertextuelles, utopies et
diverses formes d’indirection se conjuguent pour dessiner les contours d’une anatomie originale de la
nation anglaise

https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2635

 Schneider, Ralf. “Marguerite Radclyffe Hall.” (2015).

1901 finanzielle Unabhangigkeit durch eine Erbschaf; ab 1906 Veroffentlichung von Gedichten; 1907
Bekanntschaf mit der langjahrigen Geliebten Mabel Veronica Batten (›Ladye‹); 1915 Tod Battens und
Beziehung mit Una Lady Troubridge; 1926 Adam’s Breed (Roman), mehrfach preisgekront, weitere
Romane; ab 1934 Liaison mit Evgenia Souline.

 Terradillos, Tina. “Les appellations et l’émancipation des étiquettes : Radclyffe Hall et The Well
of Loneliness revisités.” (2014).

Cet article examine comment le double etiquetage diegetique et historique du roman The Well of
Loneliness de Radclyffe Hall rend compte de l’experience individuelle et collective de l’« inversion »,
terme designant alors l’homosexualite, et quelles relations a la realite il semble convoquer.
Contrairement a la relation d’identification qui emerge d’abord, il apparait que Radclyffe Hall deconstruit
« la » realite, notamment en detournant l’abject attache a l’homosexualite et en reutilisant ce motif pour
mettre a distance cette realite. Son projet ne se limite donc pas a une reconnaissance des
homosexuels comme la posterite critique le laisse penser, mais a une reflexion sur les modalites du
rapport a l’Autre, d’ou l’ouverture necessaire a The Forge et The Unlit Lamp publies anterieurement.
Cette esquisse d’une ethique de l’alterite qui s’appuie sur un questionnement du feminin est alors mise
en regard avec la philosophie contemporaine de Malabou qui demonte elle aussi les mecanismes des
appellations pour proposer un depassement du binarisme de l’alterite en suggerant, comme le
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pressentait Radclyffe Hall, un troisieme terme dans la relation afin que chacun, homme et/ou femme,
puisse exister en propre. 

https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1229

 Lewis, Brian. “Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing by Richard Dellamora (review).” Journal of the
History of Sexuality 23 (2014): 303 - 305.

 Schmidt, Michael. “36. ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT: Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand,
Radclyffe Hall, Ivy Compton- Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Muriel Spark, Gabriel Josipovici, Christine
Brooke- Rose, B. S. Johnson, William Gass, John Barth, Harry Mathews, Walter Abish, Thomas
Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen.” (2014).

 Bauer, Heike. “Radclyffe Hall: a life in the writingRICHARD DELLAMORA.” Women's History


Review 23 (2014): 143 - 144.

 Hall, Radclyffe. “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself.” (2013).

 Krainitzki, Eva L. “A figura da “invertida” congénita em 'The Well of Loneliness' (1928) de


Radclyffe Hall e as origens da lésbica “máscula”.” (2013).

Extensamente lido, incessantemente criticado, amado e odiado, o romance The Well of Loneliness
(1928), de Radclyffe Hall pode ser considerado um classico da literatura lesbica. Apesar de ter sido
alvo de criticas violentas ao longo dos anos, apresenta a oportunidade de um discurso “em troca” no
sentido foucaultiano, dando voz a uma subjectividade homoerotica feminina, a “invertida congenita”
dos sexologos. Uma reflexao sobre o romance The Well e incontornavel no quadro dos estudos sobre a
representacao da identidade e visibilidade lesbicas. Discute-se neste artigo a influencia dos discursos
da sexologia do seculo XIX e a problematica do binarismo heterssexista na construcao da proto-
identidade lesbica contida neste romance.

 Stephenson, Mimosa. “Book Review: Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the WritingRadclyffe Hall: A Life in
the Writing. By DellamoraRichard. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ISBN
978-0-8122-4346-8. Pp. xxii + 319. $34.95.” Christianity and Literature 62 (2013): 306-309.

 Stetz, Margaret D.. “Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing by Richard Dellamora (review).” Tulsa
Studies in Women's Literature 30 (2013): 472 - 474.

 Hall, Radclyffe. “The Sixth Beatitude.” (2013).

 Funke, Jana. “richard dellamora. Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing.” The Review of English
Studies 63 (2012): 522-523.

 Nair, Sashi N. “‘Moral poison’: Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness.” (2012).

Reflecting upon Radclyffe Hall’s decision to write a novel about the suffering of the female


homosexual, Hall’s lover of almost three decades, Una Troubridge, wrote that: ‘it was her absolute
conviction that such a book could only be written by a sexual invert, who alone could be qualified by
personal knowledge and experience to speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority’.1

7
There is little doubt that Hall’s own life, and the lives of friends and acquaintances provided material
and inspiration for The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928. However, The Well, as a whole, is not a
roman a clef, and this chapter provides invaluable insight into the cultural and social backdrop against
which authors of Sapphic modernist romans a clef were working. Like many writers, Hall inserted
aspects of her experience into her novels. What differentiates a novel like The Well from those novels
that I will identify as Sapphic romans a clef is its address, which aimed to determine the reaction of an
uncomplicated, mainstream audience, rather than anticipating and negotiating multiple simultaneous
audience reactions. Hall aimed to change minds, and to elicit a single sympathetic response, and this
motivation is written into the pages of her novel. The importance of this chapter, then, lies in what it
reveals about the limits of the speakable in the interwar period; its establishment of an understanding
of the configuration of public and private that governed such speech; its illumination of the strategies
that enabled writers to write about samesex desire (as well as those that failed); and the work it does in
differentiating the roman a clef from novels that simply borrow from life

 Halberstam, Judith Jack. ““A Writer of Misfits”: John Radclyffe Hall and the Discourse of
Inversion.” (2012).
 Potolsky, Matthew. “Richard Dellamora. Radclyffe Hall: A Life in Writing. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4346-8. Price: US$34.95/£23.00Richard
Dellamora. Radclyffe Hall: A Life in Writing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2011. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4346-8. Price: US$34.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the
Net (2012): n. pag.
 Dellamora, Richard. “Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing.” (2011).
 Dellamora, Richard. “Introduction. Writing Radclyffe Hall Writing.” (2011).
 Baylen, Joseph O.. “Radclyffe Hall.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 42 (2010): 463 -
468.
 Bauer, Heike. “Stephen Gordon Super-Invert: The Sexology of Radclyffe Hall.” (2009).

Partly as a legacy of the new possibilities opened to women during the First World War, Britain in the
1920s experienced what appeared to be a moment of increased sex and gender tolerance.1 Esther
Newton, in her ground-breaking essay on the emergence of a modern lesbian identity, has examined
this shift, explaining that for the new generation of twentieth century women, female ‘autonomy from
family was, if not a given, a right’.2 This had implications for ways in which women theorised sexual
inversion, for unlike those nineteenth-century New Women who explored female desire primarily in
relation to questions such as economic emancipation and alternatives to conventional heterosexual
marriage, a new type of independent women writer in the early twentieth century focused explicitly on
issues of sexual identity and female same-sex desire. The extensive range of works about women and
modernism including recent studies of lesbianism by Laura Doan, Terry Castle, Erin Carlston and
Joanne Winning, has shown the importance of explorations of sexuality, especially, female same-sex
desire, for writers such as Katherine Mansfield, May Sinclair, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude
Stein and Virginia Woolf.3 Critics tend to agree that the legacies of sexology play little role in their
works, which may have been indebted to ‘the explosion of discourses of sex from the late nineteenth
century onwards’, as Hugh Stevens has pointed out in Modernist Sexualities,4 but which also
deliberately sought to break with the sexual as well as the literary conventions of the Victorian age

 Thompson, Elizabeth Boyd. “Our Three Selves: The Life of Radclyffe Hall (review).” MFS Modern
Fiction Studies 33 (2009): 729 - 730.

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 Newton, Esther. “Le mythe de la lesbienne masculine : Radclyffe Hall et la Nouvelle Femme.”
(2008).

Au xixe siecle, la premiere generation de Nouvelles Femmes, bourgeoises eduquees et independantes,


privilegia l’exaltation des amities amoureuses a l’expression publique de la sexualite entre
femmes. Radclyffe Hall appartient a la seconde generation, contemporaine du modernisme pronant la
liberte sexuelle contre les valeurs victoriennes. Hall est souvent condamnee pour avoir repris le modele
de l’invertie des sexologues, mais comment aurait-elle pu s’y prendre pour faire de la Nouvelle Femme
eprise des femmes un etre sexuel ? Les femmes, selon les criteres de l’epoque, n’ayant pas de libido,
l’affirmation de leur sexualite passe par la masculinisation, garconne heterosexuelle ou lesbienne
costumee en homme. Dans ce systeme de representation, la lesbienne feminine est une impossibilite
logique.

 Nyman, Micki. “Displaced Deviancy in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.” Feminist Studies
in English Literature 16 (2008): 79-101.
 Newton, Esther. “The Myth of the Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.”
(2008).

In the 19th century, the first generation of New Women, educated and independent middle-class
women, favoured the exaltation of loving friendships rather than the public expression of sexuality
between women. Radclyffe Hall belonged to the second generation, contemporary with a modernism
that preached sexual freedom as against Victorian values. Hall is often condemned for having used the
invert model of sexologists, but how could she do otherwise in representing the New Woman attracted
by women as a sexual being? Since the criteria of the period presumed women were without libido or
sexual desire, the affirmation of their sexuality was achieved through masculinisation ? a heterosexual
tomboy or lesbian dressed as a man. In this representative system, a feminine lesbian was a logical
impossibility

 Jennings, Rebecca. “Radclyffe Hall, "The Well of Loneliness" (1928).” (2008).


 Doan, Laura L.. “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself: The queer navigational systems of Radclyffe
Hall.” English Language Notes 45 (2007): 9-22.
 Watkins, Susan. “’The aristocracy of intellect’: Inversion and Inheritance in Radclyffe Hall’s The
Well of Loneliness.” (2007).

The successful prosecution of The Well of Loneliness for obscenity has become one of the landmark
cases in the history of literature and censorship in the UK in the first half of the twentieth century. The
novel’s subject matter — same-sex love between women — was undoubtedly controversial, but its plea
that ‘sexual inversion’ should be considered as congenital and therefore morally blameless was
particularly scandalous. Radclyffe Hall’s deployment of the theories of sexologists in The Well of
Loneliness has been well documented.1 Indeed, a central focus of critical attention has been the
question of whether the popular dissemination of such ideas as ‘congenital inversion’ (as a result of
publicity surrounding the novel’s trial) proved positive or negative for the expression and explanation of
same-sex love between women. Did the novel create the possibility for a ‘reverse discourse’, ultimately
defining a distinct sexual and personal identity with attendant human rights for women who desired
other women, or did it pathologize and demonize what had previously been perceived as innocent
romantic friendship?

 Krainitzki, Eva L. “There are so many of us: a diversidade na representação da identidade


lésbica em The well of loneliness de Radclyffe Hall.” (2007).

9
 Letras, Faculdade de Filosofia. “'There are so many of us': A Diversidade na Representação da
Identidade Lésbica em The Well of Loneliness de Radclyffe Hall.” (2007).
 Ladenson, Elisabeth. “Chapter Four. Radclyffe Hall: The Well of Prussic Acid.” (2006).
 Troubridge, Una Vincenzo Lady. “The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall.” (2006).
 Rodríguez, José Tomás Monterrey. “¿Coplas canarias en lengua inglesa?: Tenerife en la obra
poética de Radclyffe Hall.” (2006).

espanolRadclyffe Hall, conocida sobre todo por ser la autora del clasico de narrativa lesbica The Well
of Loneliness (1928), paso unas vacaciones en Tenerife en 1909 y 1910. Los felices recuerdos de
aquellos dias le inspiraron no solo el telon de fondo de la parte central de la novela, sino una secuencia
de coplas en lengua inglesa en la que intento imitar la lirica popular canaria. En este articulo se ofrece
una traduccion de la secuencia de poemas «Songs of the Canary Islands» de Radclyffe Hall, asi como
de las coplas ineditas de esta secuencia que quedaron excluidas en la edicion de 1948. En la parte final
se anaden tambien unos poemas sobre Tenerife de la coleccion Poems ofthe Past & Present (1910)
EnglishRadclyffe Hall, the author ofthe classic lesbian novel The Well ofLoneliness (1928), spent
holidays in Tenerife in 1909 and in 1910. The memories of those happy days inspired not only the
background landscape for the central episode ofthe novel, but also a song sequence in imitation ofthe
Canarian folk lyrics. In this article a Spanish translation of «Songs of the Canary Islands» is offered, as
well as the unpublished songs excluded from the 1948 edition. A number of poems about Tenerife from
the collection Poems of the Past & Present (191 O) are also added in the last section

 Medd, Jodie. “Séances and Slander: Radclyffe Hall in 1920.” (2006).

Although the 1928 obscenity trial against The Well of Loneliness may be the legal event for
which Radclyffe Hall is best remembered, her scandalous homosexual trials began long before the
publication of her lesbian Bildungsroman. In fact, her dedication of The Well of Loneliness to “Our Three
Selves” gestures to the complicated triangle of relationships that brought Hall—and accusations of
lesbianism—into the courtroom before she had even penned her first novel. In Hall’s cosmology, her
identity and destiny were mystically intertwined with two other “selves”: Mabel Batten, who died in 1916,
and Una Troubridge, who lived with Hall from Batten’s death until Hall’s own death in 1943. It
was Hall’s passionate attachment to the dead Batten, and Troubridge’s equally ardent devotion to her
bereaved lover that brought the ghostly communications of this lesbian threesome to the headlines in
1920, when Hall charged St. George Lane Fox-Pitt, a member of the Society for Psychical Research
(SPR), with slandering her as a “grossly immoral woman.” Though brief, the trial made front-page news
as a “society scandal” and was considered “of unusual general interest” by the press.1 Attending to the
details and implications of the trial, I want to argue for the significance of this rich and telling event
within the juridical history and cultural functions of sapphic modernity

 Wells-Lynn, Amy. “The Intertextual, Sexually-Coded Rue Jacob: A Geocritical Approach to Djuna
Barnes, Natalie Barney, and Radclyffe Hall.” South Central Review 22 (2005): 112 - 78.

Using geographic sites, words, and codes to express what they cannot say in explicit sexual terms, from
New York and London onto Paris and the rue Jacob with its temple and garden, Djuna Barnes, Natalie
Barney, and Radclyffe Hall exploit space as a writing strategy, a geo-parler femme. The intersections
between characters' behaviors, authors' lived experiences, real and imaginary Parisian locations, and
the written page create for readers hidden yet shared messages of female sexuality. These women go
beyond just creating a space within Paris; they create a new Paris on the whole—a Paris where women
can write, publish, have public sexual relations with other women (and/or other men), and dance naked
in their gardens. The female Paris captured in the pages of these texts is written to both celebrate

10
literary and sexual freedom and create a space in which the activities can take place. On one hand, it
overthrows rigid gendered spatial structures while existing simultaneously to male-centered Parisian
geographies. A geocritical approach which problematizes female literary and sexual spaces, analyzes
the cycle of space—literature—space, and considers how authors create their own female cities enables
readers and critics to "locate" and map these messages, because after all, "Can one say by what Path,
under what Bush, beside what Ditch, beneath what Mountain, through what Manlabour and Slaveswork,
Man came upon the Burrows of Wisdom, and sometimes upon the skin of her herself?" In Ladies
Almanack and The Well of Loneliness, it is by the path that leads to the intertextual, sexually-coded rue
Jacob that women find female-based sexual wisdom and communicate that wisdom to others. Readers
must be willing to pursue the paths of meanings available in these and other expatriate women's
writings in order to share the context of the meanings floating between the texts of the female
expatriate community

 美里, 林, ミサト ハヤシ and Hayashi Misato. “Miss Ogilvy は shell-shock に何を見たか :
Radclyffe Hall,Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself.” (2005).
 Doan, Laura L.. “Sappho’s apotheosis? Radclyffe Hall’s queer kinship with the watchdogs of the
lord.” Sexuality and Culture 8 (2004): 80-106.
 Bauer, Heike. “Richard von Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia Sexualis" as sexual sourcebook for
Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness".” Critical Survey 15 (2003): 23-38.

Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in German in 1886, in English in 1892) by the German sexologist
Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1903) was amongst the first works in the new discipline to argue that
homosexuality was part of nature and could thus not be condemned. Here the voices of real-life
homosexuals were for the first time recorded, and these case studies led Krafft-Ebing to the belief that
homosexuality was not an acquired vice. The idea of the 'naturalness' of homosexuality was at its time
radical. Accordingly, the sexual knowledge was disseminated in a somewhat conspiratorial manner, as
it was ostensibly directed solely at medical and legal practitioners 'to exclude the lay reader'.1 The work
nevertheless gained publicity far beyond the specialist realm. I argue that this was partly due to the fact
that Krafft-Ebing's medical book provided an exciting erotic stimulus. The real interest of many of its lay
readers derived from its sexually explicit content, in other words Psychopathia Sexualis was a source
for sexual kicks. This notion can be traced in Radclyffe Hall's classic lesbian novel The Well of
Loneliness (1928), where it shines a new light on the construction of the novel's 'sexually inverted'
protagonist. Many important studies of human sexuality have so far largely neglected the notion that
Krafft-Ebing's work might have provided a source of sexual pleasure.2 Indeed criticism tended to ignore
or dismiss Krafft-Ebing's key role in the promotion of homosexuality perse. Lillian Faderman, for
example, recognized the fact that Krafft-Ebing had increasingly moved towards a more tolerant view of
homosexuality, but she relegates this information to a footnote, claiming that the influence of his
positive assessment of sexual inversion 'on popular notions of homosexuality was minimal'.3 Sheila
Jeffreys even declared that due to what she identified as his own homophobia, Krafft-Ebing had
invented the stereotype of the masculine lesbian and a 'phenomenon of female

 Green, Laura Morgan. “Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Modernist Fictions of
Identity.” (2003).

In 1928, as she was preparing to appear as a defense witness in the prosecution


of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) for obscenity, Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter: At
this moment our thoughts center upon Sapphism--we have to uphold the morality of that Well of all
that's stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other; The Well of Loneliness. (Woolf 555;
also qtd. in Cline 255) (1) Woolf's response to The Well--privately caustic, publicly supportive--prefigures
11
the ambivalence that the novel has famously continued to arouse among readers and critics. The Well
appeared on the heels of the critical and popular acclaim accorded Hall's novel Adam's Breed (1926),
recipient of the 1927 Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (which Woolf herself won the next year),
and Hall's novels share certain concerns with Woolf's. Like Woolf, Hall created female protagonists who
are artists (A Saturday Life) or writers (The Well of Loneliness), whose thwarted ambitions include an
Oxbridge education (The Unlit Lamp), who may challenge conventional gender expectations (The Unlit
Lamp, The Well of Loneliness), and whose lives are shaped by powerful (although in Hall's case almost
entirely negative) mother figures who embody traditional feminine morality (The Unlit Lamp, The Well of
Loneliness.) But Hall is not among the contemporary authors discussed in Woolf's literary journalism.
Woolf's dismissal of Hall has traditionally been read as a marking of the boundary between modernist
aesthetics and the traditions of Victorian and Edwardian realism from which modernism distinguished
itself. As Joanne Winning writes, Woolf "attempts to draw a line between [The Well of Loneliness] and
other, more innovative literature being produced around it" (372)--including, presumably, Woolf's own
covertly "Sapphic" Orlando, published shortly after The Well of Loneliness. (2) But the terms of Woolf's
critique beg more questions about boundaries than they resolve: With respect to what counter-
possibilities of motion and heat is the novel "stagnant and lukewarm"? What are the poles between
which it falls, the "one thing" or "another" that it fails to be? According to what criteria, in other words,
does Hall's novel exhibit the in-betweenness that seems to be the source of Woolf's unease? If it is in-
betweenness that is at the root of negative responses to the novel, might it be possible to read that in-
betweenness differently, as a source of the novel's strength rather than its weakness? Finally,
might Hall's depiction of an "in-between" identity illuminate the problems of grounding narratives of
identity in modernist narrative and beyond? Certainly, Hall's curiously "lukewarm" stance toward her
immediate literary context--the aesthetic context of high modernism and the intellectual context of
Freudian theorizing--seems suggestivh278as a ground for Woolf's reaction. (3) "Neither one thing nor
another" accurately describes The Well's relationships to, on the one hand, a Victorian narrative concern
with the social and material milieus and, on the other hand, a modernist concern with interior
consciousness. The Well's opening sentence--"Not very far from Upton-on-Severn--between it, in fact,
and the Malvern Hills--stands the country seat of the Gordons of Bramley; well-timbered, well-cottaged,
well-fenced and well-watered" (11)--could not more firmly announce its nostalgia for agrarian, country-
house society and, by extension, the traditional novel to which such a setting appertains. And yet
Stephen Gordon's trajectory propels her firmly out of the milieu thus announced, into a future defined by
exile. The "country seat" becomes a painful reminder, embodying "that inherent respect of [sic] the
normal which nothing had ever been able to destroy [in Stephen] ... an added burden it was, handed
down by the silent but watchful founders of Morton [Hall]" (430). Similarly, if the novel's plotting notably
depends upon the conventions of the heterosexual romance, its climax, in which Stephen engineers her
own romantic rejection and embraces authorship as a lonely, terrifying, but generative form of
possession, makes clear Hall's belief that she and her heroine were plotting an alternative, if not entirely
new, fictional trajectory. …

 Doan, Laura L.. “'The Outcast of One Age is the Hero of Another': Radclyffe Hall, Edward
Carpenter and the Intermediate Sex.” (2002).
 Breen, Margaret Soenser. “Radclyffe Hall, E. Lynn Harris, and Franz Kafka: Christianity,
Queerness, and the Politics of Normalcy.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender
Studies 6 (2001): 293-304.

This essay examines Christian tropes in three queer texts: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
(1928), E. Lynn Harris's Just As I Am (1994), and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915). At issue are
the linkages between queer theory and literature, on the one hand, and Christian paradigms, on the
12
other hand. This essay considers whether, insofar as they deploy Christian tropes, these texts sustain a
politics of the normal that inevitably subvert queer-positive representations

 Souhami, Diana. “The Trials of Radclyffe Hall.” (1998).

This is a biography of Radclyffe Hall, one of England nost eccentric contemporaywomen. She is also
the quintissential gay and lesbian icon. The book spans her whole life from her unhappy childhood to
the contravercy of her most famous book" Well of Loneliness". Brilliantly written, witty and satirical, this
major new biography brings a fresh and irreverent eye to the life of this fascinating eccentric

 Cline, Sally. “Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John.” (1997).

A biography of Radclyffe Hall, this work examines the life of the writer; her works, including "The Well of
Loneliness", which was taken to trial and banned for obscenity; her religious beliefs; and her ideas on
sexuality, including her tormented triangular relationships

 Hall, Radclyffe and Joanne Glasgow. “Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall.” (1997).

This landmark book represents the first publication of original writing by Radclyffe Hall, author of The
Well of Loneliness, in over 50 years. One of the most famous and influential lesbian novelists of the
twentieth century, Hall became a cause clbre in 1928, upon the publication of her novel The Well of
Loneliness, when the British government brought action on behalf of the Crown to declare the book
obscene. Probably the most widely read lesbian novel ever written, the book has been continuously in
print since its first publication and remains to this day an important part of the literary landscape.
Expertly deciphered and edited by Hall scholar and biographer Joanne Glasgow, Your John is a
selection of Hall's love letters to Evguenia Souline, a White Russian emigre with whom Hall fell
completely and passionately in love in the summer of 1934. Written between this first meeting and the
onset of Hall's last illness in 1942, these letters detail Hall's growing obsession, the pain to her life
partner Una Troubridge of this betrayal, and the poignant hopelessness of a happy resolution for any of
the three women. It was ultimately this relationship, Glasgow argues, which tragically precipitated the
decline in Hall's creative work and her health. The letters also provide important new information about
her views on lesbianism and take us well beyond the artistic limits she imposed on the characters in
The Well of Loneliness. They shed light on her views on religion, politics, war, and the literary and
artistic scene. Illuminating both the nature of her relationships and her views on the current politics of
the time, Your John will greatly extend the range of our knowledge about Radclyffe Hall

 Madden, Ed. “The well of loneliness, or the gospel according to Radclyffe Hall.” Journal of
homosexuality 33 3-4 (1997): 163-86 .

The study claims a creative and interventionary power in Hall's use of biblical narratives and tropes, a
power traceable in public reception to the novel and in courtroom reactions to the use of spiritual
language in a text about lesbianism.

Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, is repeatedly described as a "bible" of lesbian
literature. The novel itself repeatedly alludes to biblical stories, especially the story of Christ. Yet there
has been little sustained analysis of the biblical language of the novel. Most feminist and lesbian critics
have dismissed the biblical allusions and language as unfortunate and politically regressive; religious
critics have ignored the novel. This essay reexamines the biblical nature of the novel, especially its
portrayal of the lesbian Stephen Gordon as a Christ figure. The study further claims a creative and
interventionary power in Hall's use of biblical narratives and tropes, a power traceable in public
reception to the novel and in courtroom reactions to the use of spiritual language in a text about

13
lesbianism. By writing the life of a lesbian as a kind of gospel of inversion, Hall turns a language of
condemnation into a language of validation, making her use of biblical language a kind of Foucauldian
"reverse discourse." The novel's power lies in its portrayal of a lesbian messiah, and in its joining of
sexological and religious discourses

 Goetz, Laura Ellen. “Drowning in loneliness and writing the blues: Creating lesbian space in the
novels of Radclyffe Hall and Leslie Feinberg.” (1997).

Feminist theory has long been concerned with identity politics, and feminists have grappled with the
ideologies and identities of race, sex, gender, and sexuality, to name only a few. Psychoanalytic theorist
Teresa Brennan and postmodern theorist Judith Butler combine feminism with their respective fields in
their quests to figure out how subjectivities are created, and why some people are objectified or created
as objects, while others are created as subjects. Literature is an excellent vehicle for studying
subject/object creation and identity politics, because it often mirrors “real” life, because literature can
have such an impact on the lives of those who read it, and because it can tap emotions and possibilities
which theory cannot. Through the portrayals of the lesbian (and transgender, in the case of Stone Butch
Blues'), protagonists’ lives, the ways in which Lhey are othered by people occupying subject positions,
and the ways in which they resist that othering, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Leslie
Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues provide numerous examples of the workings of subject and object
creation. They also illuminate possibilities which the theories cannot quite grasp, such as how to live a
life which promotes the erasure of dichotomous thinking and living. The novels and theories are also
excellent tools with which to explore facets of identity such as lesbian, butch, femme, and transgender,
in an attempt to show that it is possible to expose the fiction of individual identity in order to dismantle
our current oppressive systems of living and create a liberating, rather than an oppressive, world. R
eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm
ission. This study by: Laura E. Goetz Entitled: Drowning in Loneliness and Writing the Blues: Creating
Lesbian Space in the Novels of Radclyffe Hall and Leslie Feinberg has been approved as meeting the
thesis requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts in Women’s Studies

 Busch, Alexandra. “Margaret Radclyffe Hall (1880–1944).” (1997).

1928 erschienen drei Bucher, die zu Meilensteinen der europaischen Lesbenliteratur werden sollten:
Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack, Virginia Woolfs Orlando und Margaret Radclyffe Halls Well of
Loneliness (Quell der Einsamkeit, 1991 neu aufgelegt bei Daphne). Djuna Barnes’ privat veroffentlichter,
selbstbewust-satirischer Ladies Almanack war zwar ein groser Erfolg in der Pariser Lesbenszene,
verschwand aber fur mehr als vierzig Jahre in der Schublade und wurde erst 1972 von der Autorin zur
Veroffentlichung freigegeben. Auch Woolfs Orlando mit seiner ironisch gebrochenen Utopie vom Ende
der Grenzen des Geschlechts muste ein halbes Jahrhundert warten, um als phantasievolle und brillante
literarische Inszenierung einer lesbischen Liebesgeschichte bekannt, neu gelesen und interpretiert und
zu guter Letzt sogar verfilmt zu werden

 Backus, Margot Gayle. “Sexual Orientation in the (Post) Imperial Nation: Celticism and Inversion
Theory in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.” Tulsa studies in women's literature 15 (1996):
253.
 Brown, Penny. “Radclyffe Hall: The No-Man’s Land of Sex.” (1992).

The name of Radclyffe Hall has, until recently, been associated almost exclusively with the scandal
surrounding the publication of her novel The Well of Loneliness, an outspoken exploration of the

14
implications of lesbianism (or ‘inversion’ as she calls it) which was suppressed under the Obscene Libel
Act in 1928. Although her central preoccupation and most enduring and original contribution was the
portrayal of the problems of the ‘invert’ in a heterosexual and homophobic society, her works reveal a
wide-ranging concern with the lives of both women and men and demonstrate a sensitive approach to
the theme of the quest for meaning in existence and the fulfilment of individual potential.

 Rolley, Katrina. “Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge.” Feminist
Review 35 (1990): 54-66.
 Hall, Radclyffe. “A Saturday Life.” (1987).
 Whitlock, Gillian. “"Everything Is out of Place": Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary
Tradition.” Feminist Studies 13 (1987): 554.
 Hall, Radclyffe. “Adam's Breed.” (1985).
 Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9 (1984): 557 - 575.

This essay grew out of an earlier one called "The Mythic Lesbian and the New Woman: Power, Sexuality
and Legitimacy," written with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and presented by us at the Berkshire Conference
on the History of Women, Vassar College, June 16, 1981. A revised version of that paper has appeared
in French under the title "Le Mythe de la lesbienne et la femme nouvelle," in Strategies desfemmes
(Paris: Editions Tierce, 1984). The French collection is forthcoming in English from Indiana University
Press. SmithRosenberg's further use of this material will appear as chap. 9, "The New Woman and the
Mannish Lesbian: Gender Disorder and Social Control," in her book The New Woman and the Troubled
Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in press). Developing the Radclyffe Hall material independently, I
drew conclusions that do not represent Smith-Rosenberg's thinking and for which she is in no way
responsible. But we workedjointly for two years, and I am in her debt for all I learned from her as
historian and for her unflagging support. I am also indebted to the members of the Purchase women's
studies seminar, particularly Mary Edwards, Suzanne Kessler, and Louise Yellin, who read drafts and
made helpful suggestions, as did David M. Schneider, Carole Vance, Wendy McKenna, and especially
Amber Hollibaugh. I thank the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, where I did early research, and
Jan Boney for technical help. And for another kind of insight and support, without which this paper
might never have been written, I thank the women of the B. group

 Franks, Claudia Stillman. “Beyond the Well of Loneliness: The Fiction of Radclyffe Hall.” (1983).
 Hall, Radclyffe. “The Unlit Lamp.” (1981).

This novel portrays the love - and hate - that can exist between women. Joan's mother binds her
daughter to her with hoops of steel, a trap which nothing can spring no career, no man and certainly no
woman

 Fitzgerald, William. “Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness: Sources and Inspiration.” Journal
of Sex Research 14 (1978): 50-53.

Abstract Ever since the publication of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness in 1928, social scientists
have speculated on its autobiographical aspects. The thesis of this article is that Hall adapted her
characterizations and storyline from the work of Richard Von Krafft‐Ebing. The uncanny similarity
between Stephen Gordon and Count Sandor in terms of their physical attributes, their personal
histories, and the sequence of events could hardly be coincidental.

15
 Dickson, Lovat. “Radclyffe Hall at The well of loneliness: A sapphic chronicle.” (1975).
 Hall, Radclyffe. “The Well of Loneliness.”

Radclyffe Hall was a Great English eccentric. She is most famous today for 'The Well of Loneliness '
which she wrote in 1928. A novel about lesbian love 'Congenital inverts' the book was suppresed both
here and in the U.S., and caused Radclyffe to be put on trial under the obscene publications act. Vita
Sackville West and Virginia Woolf, both of whom had had lesbian affairs, refused to be witnesses;
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote her supportive letters. Based on her own life, The Well of Loneliness tells
the story of Sir Philip and Lady Gordon and their daughter who they baptise Stephen. It becomes
apparent that Stephen is not like the other girls : she learns to fence and hunt, wears breeches and
longs to cut her hair. When she reaches maturity she falls passionately in love with another woman. The
book was banned as obscene after a notorious and dramatic trial. It remains a classic story of Lesbian
love

 Hall, Radclyffe and Cuthbert. Wynne. “My heart’s song. Words by M. Radclyffe-Hall. Music by
Cuthbert Wynne.”
 Collections, Manuscript. “Guide to the Radclyffe Hall Correspondence, 1928.” (2003).
 Tamagne, Florence. “Notices « Allemagne », « Angleterre », « Eulenburg », « Fascisme », «
Himmler », « Magnus Hirschfeld », « Procès », « Radclyffe Hall », « Trahison », « Oscar Wilde ».”
(2003).
 Ellsworth, Erica. “A Dyke's Life: Sexual Identity and Gender Performance in Radclyffe Hall's The
Well of Loneliness.” (2000).
 Jolly, Margaret. “Radclyffe hall: a woman called john.” Womens History Review 8 (1999): 737-
762.
 Franklin, Paul B.. “Book Review Nöel Coward & Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits. By Terry Castle.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 150pp.” International Journal of Sexuality and
Gender Studies 3 (1998): 75-80.
 Castle, Terry J.. “Noël Coward & Radclyffe Hall : kindred spirits.” (1996).
 Kertzer, Adrienne. “Voices in the Well: Elizabeth Jolley and Radclyffe Hall.” Journal of
Postcolonial Writing 32 (1992): 122-132.
 Franks, Claudia Stillman. “Beyond the Well of Loneliness: The Fiction of Radclyffe Hall.” (1983).
 Troubridge, Una Vincenzo Lady. “The life of Radclyffe Hall.” (1963).
 Almada Ugalde, Tanya. “Religión y racismo en un fragmento de The Well of Loneliness.” Revista
de El Colegio de San Luis (2022): n. pag.

El objetivo de este artículo es revisar un pasaje de The Well of Loneliness, de Radclyffe Hall, en el que
religión y racismo se entrelazan para crear una escena cargada de elementos espirituales y analogías
entre la experiencia de la negritud y la inversión sexual, y analizar si estos elementos se mantienen en
la traducción de Ulyses Petit de Murat. A través de un análisis de zonas de significación se
descubrieron decisiones traductoras que afectan la caracterización de los personajes afroamericanos
y que posibilita interpretaciones por parte del lectorado hispanohablante distintas a las pretendidas por
la autora para su audiencia original. Esta investigación es pionera en los estudios de traducción, ya que
la literatura sobre The Well… se enfoca en su censura en España, mas no en el análisis de la traducción,
en particular de elementos ideológicos como la religión y el racismo

 Varese, Monica. “Lesbian existence.” Journal of Romance studies (2022): n. pag.

A close examination of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Olga Moraes Sarmento’s As
Minhas Memórias (1948) reveals interesting intersections. Hall’s epic novel is a long, plangent plea for

16
an understanding of ‘the Invert’, whereas Moraes Sarmento’s memoir, dedicated to her female lover,
offers thinly disguised clues as to her own sexuality. Moraes Sarmento settled in Paris, for she did not
care for the Portuguese mindset of her time. An intriguing aspect of her memoir is when she indulges in
a lengthy meditation, similar, though not as maudlin as Hall’s, on her possible ‘missteps’ in life and,
like Hall, goes over the head of ecclesiastical authority to address God’s merciful judgment. My article
seeks to tease out the subtle implications of the themes ‘nature’, ‘human nature’, and ‘God’ in
Sarmento’s memoir and contrast them with Hall’s more heightened arguments

 Pająk, Paulina. “1933: the year of lesbian modernism in Poland?” Women's History Review 31
(2021): 28 - 50.

ABSTRACT This article makes the first attempt at the reconstruction of lesbian modernism within local
and transnational modernist networks in Poland. It covers a brief span of 1933, the extraordinary year
that witnessed the publication of three novels with lesbian and sapphic themes: Radclyffe Hall’s Źródło
samotności (the translation of The Well of Loneliness) with Irena Krzywicka’s preface, Maria
Modrakowska’s Anetka, and Aniela Gruszecka’s Przygoda w nieznanym kraju. On the basis of these
works and archival research, the article argues that these novels contributed to the lesbian fiction which
emerged in Polish literature sixty years earlier than the widely accepted 1990s.

 Bristow, Joseph. “Inverse Intimacy: Reconfiguring ‘Personal Relations’ in Elizabeth Bowen's The
Hotel.” Irish University Review 51 (2021): 40-56.

Ever since its publication in 1927, Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, has prompted critical
responses that have tried to gauge the ways in which the narrative represents intimacy between
women. Although one of its earliest reviewers sensed that the ‘dark, forlorn spirit of inversion is all
through it’, modern critics have acknowledged that The Hotel is not engaged with the sexological
models of inversion that inform Radclyffe Hall's contemporaneous novel, The Well of Loneliness
(1928). At the same time, commentators have recognized that The Hotel forms part of a group of
1920s fictions that address female homosexuality with increasing openness. For the most part, readers
have focused close attention on the intimate friendship that develops between the young Sydney
Warren and the middle-aged widow Mrs. Kerr. This bond, even if it is fraught with tension, remains a
source of prurient fascination among the other English residents enjoying a wintertime dolce far niente
on the Italian Riviera. Still, the sustained critical focus on the attachment that develops between these
two characters has tended to ignore the significance of the partnership between the two single women,
Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, that places the whole span of the novel in parentheses. Although recent
studies by Elizabeth Cullingford and Maud Ellmann have drawn attention to Bowen's interest in what it
means to be a ‘singleton’ or part of stadial series of personal relationships (single, couple, and triad),
little has been said about the two spinsters, each of whom is ‘half of a duality’. The present essay
concentrates attention on the ways in which the enumerative turn in Bowen studies broadens in scope
when we look at how Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald appear as both two in one and one in two: a
narrative formula that reminds us not of sexual inversion but the inverse number in mathematics. It is
this type of inverse intimacy between woman and woman that triumphs at the end of The Hotel.

 Zaragoza Ninet, Gora and Sara Llopis Mestre. “The Unlit Lamp (1924): translation, reception and
censorship.” Language and Intercultural Communication 21 (2021): 37 - 54.

ABSTRACT Francoist censorship hindered the publication of literature in Spain that contradicted the
principles of the dictatorship. This article aims to examine the reception, censorship and translation
into Spanish of Radclyffe Hall's first, The Unlit Lamp (1924), a novel that introduced progressive models
of women at the time and a foregrounded lesbian relationship. The study also seeks to reflect on the
17
link between the role of the censor and the translator, explore the reasons why the novel eluded
complete censorship and analyse how it was partially censored, as well as the cultural implications of
such manipulative practice

 Taylor, Jessica, Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan and Ahmed Hassan. “Garçon Manqué: A Queer
Rereading (of) The Sheik.” (2020).

This article reads E.M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) through the lens of queer and trans studies, centering
the analysis on the beginning of the book where Diana Mayo, the main character, is portrayed as an
imperial boy. Starting with a consideration of how the readership of the novel has been used to interpret
The Sheik, I argue that a focus on a heterosexual woman reader who herself desires the novel’s hero,
Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, has obscured the queerness of Diana’s gender. Instead, I consider how we
might read Diana with a trans lens and take seriously her masculinity, paying attention to the opening of
the book rather than the ending where her ordeals and developing love for Ahmed have rendered her
womanly. Diana’s initial masculinity crucially intersects with her English imperialism and her
identification with the position of masculine power. I compare The Sheik to another interwar British
novel with a masculine heroine—Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). While The Well of
Loneliness places its heroine within a queer framework, it is ironically in part because of The Sheik’s
lack of positioning of Diana within any queer or trans community or identity category that the novel can
be read as presenting an alternate vision of past trans joy. Finally, I consider how lingering on Diana’s
masculinity reveals her and Ahmed Ben Hassan as doubles of each other, each exploring the
ambiguities of inheritance and upbringing in both gender and race. While some readings might then
focus on what this reveals about the instabilities of gender, I end with a trans reading that instead
embraces Diana’s attachment to her boyhood, before the plot closes off that possibility. About the
Author: Jessica Taylor is currently a Humanities Policy Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. She received her PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Toronto. She has
published both academic and non-academic work on romance fiction, silent film, technology and ride-
hailing, stamp collections, and queer literature. She is also on the board of The History Project, an
LGBTQ community archive

 Love, Heather K.. “Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.” (2007).

"Feeling Backward" weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay
culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear
benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses - losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since
many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the
closet."Feeling Backward" makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now
threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks
at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might
value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on,
we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.Through
elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through
stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, "Feeling Backward" argues for a form of
politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects

 Ellsworth, Erica. “A Dyke's Life: Sexual Identity and Gender Performance in Radclyffe Hall's The
Well of Loneliness.” (2000).

18
 Kertzer, Adrienne. “Voices in the Well: Elizabeth Jolley and Radclyffe Hall.” Journal of
Postcolonial Writing 32 (1992): 122-132.
 Ormrod, Richard K.. “Gabriele D'Annunzio and Radclyffe Hall.” Modern Language Review 84
(1989): 842.
 Wood, Alice. “Fiction for the Woman of To-day: The Modern Short Story in Eve.” The Modern
Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880-1950 (2020): n. pag.

This chapter explores short fiction published in Eve, later Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a magazine directed
to ‘the woman of to-day and tomorrow’ in print between 1921-29. This elite English women’s paper was
avowedly modern in outlook - debating new social roles for women, new ideas about psychology and
sexuality, changing relations between the sexes and modernist aesthetics - at the same time as
upholding traditional values such as respect for class hierarchy and marriage within its routine content
of society gossip columns, fashion pages, travel writing and reviews of new books, art exhibitions and
theatre. This chapter shows how the tension between modernity and convention was also reflected in
the magazine’s short stories, which ranged from formulaic and conservative plots to experimental and
subversive narratives. It reads stories by familiar and forgotten authors, including Elizabeth Bowen,
Joyce Anstruther, Marthe Troly-Curtin and Radclyffe Hall, that, in more or less radical ways, probed new
models of femininity and new models for heterosexual relationships

 Spišiaková, Eva. “‘We’ve called her Stephen’.” Target-international Journal of Translation


Studies 32 (2020): 144-162.

espanolEste articulo tiene como objetivo contribuir a la interseccion aun en gran parte inexplorada de la
traduccion y las identidades no cisgenero a traves de una comparacion de tres reediciones de The Well
of Loneliness (1928) de Radclyffe Hall en traduccion checa. Si bien muchos consideran que la novela
es la historia lesbica mas famosa publicada en el siglo XX, tambien puede leerse como una narrativa
con una protagonista transgenero. Esto se debe en parte al hecho de que el heroe de la historia nace
con un cuerpo femenino pero se llama Stephen, lo que crea una sensacion de disonancia de genero en
toda la novela. Este articulo pregunta que sucede cuando este nombre masculino cambia a uno
femenino en la traduccion, y explora las circunstancias sociopoliticas y las normas de publicacion que
han motivado este cambio. EnglishThis article aims to contribute to the still largely unexplored
intersection of translation and non-cisgender identities through a comparison of three reeditions
of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) in Czech translation. While the novel is considered by
many to be the most famous lesbian story published in the 20th century, it can also be read as a
narrative with a transgender protagonist. This is in part supported by the fact that the hero of the story
is born with a female body but is named Stephen, creating a sense of gendered dissonance throughout
the novel. This article asks what happens when this masculine name changes into a feminine one in
translation, and explores the sociopolitical circumstances and publishing norms that have motivated
this change

 Taylor, Jessica, Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan and Ahmed Hassan. “Garçon Manqué: A Queer
Rereading (of) The Sheik.” (2020).

This article reads E.M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) through the lens of queer and trans studies, centering
the analysis on the beginning of the book where Diana Mayo, the main character, is portrayed as an
imperial boy. Starting with a consideration of how the readership of the novel has been used to interpret
The Sheik, I argue that a focus on a heterosexual woman reader who herself desires the novel’s hero,
Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, has obscured the queerness of Diana’s gender. Instead, I consider how we
19
might read Diana with a trans lens and take seriously her masculinity, paying attention to the opening of
the book rather than the ending where her ordeals and developing love for Ahmed have rendered her
womanly. Diana’s initial masculinity crucially intersects with her English imperialism and her
identification with the position of masculine power. I compare The Sheik to another interwar British
novel with a masculine heroine—Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). While The Well of
Loneliness places its heroine within a queer framework, it is ironically in part because of The Sheik’s
lack of positioning of Diana within any queer or trans community or identity category that the novel can
be read as presenting an alternate vision of past trans joy. Finally, I consider how lingering on Diana’s
masculinity reveals her and Ahmed Ben Hassan as doubles of each other, each exploring the
ambiguities of inheritance and upbringing in both gender and race. While some readings might then
focus on what this reveals about the instabilities of gender, I end with a trans reading that instead
embraces Diana’s attachment to her boyhood, before the plot closes off that possibility. About the
Author: Jessica Taylor is currently a Humanities Policy Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. She received her PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Toronto. She has
published both academic and non-academic work on romance fiction, silent film, technology and ride-
hailing, stamp collections, and queer literature. She is also on the board of The History Project, an
LGBTQ community archive

 Micir, Melanie. “The Passion Projects.” (2019).

It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse
movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines
biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends,
colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of
modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary
legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall,
Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others. The book explores an extensive
body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's carefullly annotated letters to her partner
Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,
Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend
and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled
away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience
now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped
the contemporary understanding of the field. Arguing for the importance of biography, the book shows
how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities
for future generations to discover.

 Moore, Melina Alice. “"A Boy inside It": Beebo Brinker and the Transmasculine Narratives of Ann
Bannon's Lesbian Pulp.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25 (2019): 569 - 598.

Abstract:This essay explores Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp series "The Beebo Brinker Chronicles" through
the lens of trans studies, placing her eponymous hero in conversation with the inversion rhetoric of
sexological discourse and the transgender pulp novels that circulated alongside Bannon's texts in the
1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo's masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon
draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness — now widely read as a transgender text —
Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary
canons. Revisioning Beebo as a transmasculine character transforms our understanding of an
unfolding trans-gender literary tradition, offering a bridge between Hall's Stephen Gordon and later
twentieth-century articulations of transmasculine identity and embodiment. Further, the essay suggests
20
that Bannon's series provides a vital intervention in the "case study" framing that dominated both
transgender pulp novels and The Well by offering a vision of trans experience that, presented in the
romance genre, exists outside medical authority. If we broaden the context for studying Beebo to
include other contemporary trans literary genealogies, Bannon's work becomes integral to
understanding the pulp genre's treatment of transgender themes and the reach of transgender plots
and possibilities at midcentury

 Bayley, Susan N.. “Fictional German governesses in Edwardian popular culture: English
responses to German militarism and modernity.” Literature & History 28 (2019): 194 - 213.

Historians have tended to focus on propaganda when assessing Edwardian attitudes towards Germans,
but a shift of focus to fiction reveals a rather different picture. Whereas propaganda created the cliché
of ‘the Hun’, fiction produced non- and even counter-stereotypical figures of Germans. An analysis of
German governess characters in a selection of short stories, performances, novels, and cartoons
indicates that the Edwardian image of Germans was not purely negative but ambivalent and
multifarious. Imagined German governesses appeared as patriots and spies, pacifists and warmongers,
spinsters and seducers, victims and evil-doers. A close look at characterisations by Saki [H. H. Munro],
M. E. Francis [Margaret Blundell], Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Hart and
others reveals not only their variety but also their metaphorical use as responses to Germany’s
aggressive militarism and avant-garde modernity. Each governess figure conveyed a positive, negative
or ambivalent message about the potential impact of German militarism and modernity on England and
Englishness. The aggregate image of German governesses, and by inference Germans, was therefore
equivocal and demonstrates the mixed feelings of Edwardians toward their ‘cousin’ country.

 Tschacksch, Nadine. “‘Think of the Children!’ Desire and Innocence in British Queer Fiction of
the Early Twentieth Century.” Women: A Cultural Review 30 (2019): 162 - 185.

Abstract Nearly all relationships have power imbalances, none more so than age-dissimilar ones.
Women writers of the early twentieth century addressed the issues of sexual innocence and ignorance
in literary same-sex relationships with differing levels of perception and tangents of criticism. This
article examines how innocence is portrayed, deployed and perceived in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of
Women (1917), Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
(1928) and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) and how the idea of queerness complicates the issue
of childhood innocence. It explores to what extent characters cast as innocent become vehicles for
their female authors to express sexually and socially transgressive desires at a time when feminism
was publicly and scientifically linked to lesbianism

 Peksoy, Emrah. “Guilty aesthetic pleasures.” European Journal of English Studies 23 (2019): 115
- 117.

Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000), and Celia Marshik’s British Modernism and Censorship (2006). Their
expertise in this field shines through, and topics as wide-ranging as suffrage, copyright law, libel,
pornography and censorship are addressed with exacting detail. The seemingly obligatory case study
on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) also includes a contrasting study on the censorship
of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), with each illuminating the other and saving a well-worn subject area from
seeming repetitive. If one were to offer a criticism for the volume, it would be that, whilst it makes a few
brief nods towards trans issues, Modernism, Sex, and Gender neglects both the revolutions that were
taking place in the conceptualization of trans gender during the modernist period, and the exciting new
scholarship that treats modernist literature in this context. The likes of Jay Prosser, Chris Coffman and
Lucas Crawford have all published on the subject within the timeline of the analysis, and the omission
21
of this newer strand of modernist study is made starker by the text’s thoroughness in other areas.
Regardless of this small qualification, however, Modernism, Sex, and Gender provides a thorough tour
of both modernist literature and its theorists and critics by two extremely knowledgeable guides. Its
nuanced approach to modernism should prove an illuminating read for any scholar interested in
receiving a deeper education in the interactions of gender with modernist literature both inside and
outside of the typical canon

 Zaragoza, Gora. “Gender, Translation, and Censorship.” Censorship, Surveillance, and


Privacy (2019): n. pag.

After the “cultural turn” in the 1980s, translation was redefined as a cultural transfer rather than a
linguistic transposition. Key translation concepts were revised, including equivalence, correction, and
fidelity. Feminist approaches to translation emerged, for example, the recovery of texts lost in
patriarchy. Following the death of Franco and the transition to democracy, Spain initiated a cultural
expansion. The advent of the Franco regime after the civil war (1936-1939) resulted in years of cultural
involution and the abolition of rights for women attained during the Spanish Second Republic (1931-
1939). Severe censoring prevented the publication of literature—both native and foreign (through
translation)—that contradicted the principles of the dictatorship. This chapter will examine the link
between gender, translation, and censorship, materialised in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
(1928), the first English novel to tackle lesbianism and transgenderism, an example of translation in
cultural evolution.

 Donnelly, Sue. “Coming Out in the Archives: the Hall-Carpenter Archives at the London School of
Economics.” History Workshop Journal 66 (2008): 180 - 184.

The archive and journal collections of the Hall-Carpenter Archives (HCA) have been housed at the LSE
since 1988. The archive, named in honour of novelist Radclyffe Hall and socialist writer, Edward
Carpenter, was founded in 1982 to document the development of gay activism in the UK since the
publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1958. The archive operated as an independent archive based at
the London Lesbian and Gay Centre for several years before being transferred to the Archives of the
London School of Economics. The archive is now a rich resource of archives, ephemera and printed
materials documenting the development of gay activism and community in the United Kingdom since
the 1950s

Da pag 14 da fare

 Micir, Melanie. “Intimate Archives.” The Passion Projects (2019): n. pag.

This chapter demonstrates that some intimate biographical acts are designed as archival projects to be
mined later. It suggests that compilers of intimate archives, such as Radclyffe Hall, his long-time
partner Una Troubridge, alongside her lover Evguenia Souline prioritize future researchers over
midcentury readers. This chapter focuses on Ann Cvetkovich's notion of the “archive of feelings” and
further proposes that some queer feminist life stories were intentionally left incomplete—even
unwritten. The chapter concludes with a substantial engagement with Sylvia Townsend Warner's late-
career life writing. Claiming that the archive of her partnership with Valentine Ackland could not be
published without a safe margin for everyone to be dead in. Warner spent years after Ackland's death
22
assembling an intimate archive of their literary life together. Like Troubridge and Souline's letters,
Warner's archive was intentionally assembled, collated, annotated, and saved for a more generous
future audience

 Tschacksch, Nadine. “‘Think of the Children!’ Desire and Innocence in British Queer Fiction of
the Early Twentieth Century.” Women: A Cultural Review 30 (2019): 162 - 185.

Abstract Nearly all relationships have power imbalances, none more so than age-dissimilar ones.
Women writers of the early twentieth century addressed the issues of sexual innocence and ignorance
in literary same-sex relationships with differing levels of perception and tangents of criticism. This
article examines how innocence is portrayed, deployed and perceived in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of
Women (1917), Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
(1928) and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) and how the idea of queerness complicates the issue
of childhood innocence. It explores to what extent characters cast as innocent become vehicles for
their female authors to express sexually and socially transgressive desires at a time when feminism
was publicly and scientifically linked to lesbianis

 Peksoy, Emrah. “Guilty aesthetic pleasures.” European Journal of English Studies 23 (2019): 115
- 117.

Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000), and Celia Marshik’s British Modernism and Censorship (2006). Their
expertise in this field shines through, and topics as wide-ranging as suffrage, copyright law, libel,
pornography and censorship are addressed with exacting detail. The seemingly obligatory case study
on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) also includes a contrasting study on the censorship
of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), with each illuminating the other and saving a well-worn subject area from
seeming repetitive. If one were to offer a criticism for the volume, it would be that, whilst it makes a few
brief nods towards trans issues, Modernism, Sex, and Gender neglects both the revolutions that were
taking place in the conceptualization of trans gender during the modernist period, and the exciting new
scholarship that treats modernist literature in this context. The likes of Jay Prosser, Chris Coffman and
Lucas Crawford have all published on the subject within the timeline of the analysis, and the omission
of this newer strand of modernist study is made starker by the text’s thoroughness in other areas.
Regardless of this small qualification, however, Modernism, Sex, and Gender provides a thorough tour
of both modernist literature and its theorists and critics by two extremely knowledgeable guides. Its
nuanced approach to modernism should prove an illuminating read for any scholar interested in
receiving a deeper education in the interactions of gender with modernist literature both inside and
outside of the typical canon

 Albert, Nicole G.. “Langage coercitif, pratiques émancipatrices : des lesbiennes sous l’œil de
la clinique.” Histoire, médecine et santé (2018): n. pag.

A la fin du xixe siecle, la sexologie emerge comme discipline scientifique visant a elaborer les
« perversions sexuelles », parmi lesquelles le saphisme, deja aborde – et condamne – principalement
par des ecrivains masculins. Pendant plusieurs decennies, des cliniciens vont tenter de cerner
l’homosexualite, tant pour la traiter que pour trancher entre son caractere inne et acquis. Ils etablissent
des cadres et des categories dans lesquelles les lesbiennes finiront par se reconnaitre, allant jusqu’a
voir dans l’entreprise nosographique une possibilite d’exister et de s’accepter. J’analyse ce phenomene
ambivalent a la lumiere de quelques œuvres litteraires, en particulier Le puits de solitude
de Radclyffe Hall (1928) et Diana: A Strange Autobiography (1939). Dans les deux cas, les theses

23
medicales servent de grille de lecture a la fois aux autrices et a leur personnage principal ou alter ego et
leur permettent de revendiquer la naturalite de leurs desirs comme de leur identite sexuelle

 Forster, Christine. “Filthy Material.” Oxford Scholarship Online (2018): n. pag.

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy
Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and
literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and
new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was
defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist
obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from
the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at
the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing
media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh
account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light
on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates
the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with
obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account
of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a
contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies

 Costello, Karen A.. “A no-man's-land of sex: Reading Stephen Gordon and “her” critics.” Journal
of Lesbian Studies 22 (2018): 165 - 184.

ABSTRACT One of the most read novels of lesbian, transgender, and queer
criticism, Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) has given rise to numerous and
contradictory interpretations of the protagonist Stephen Gordon's complex relationship to her body.
Some have argued that she is a historically specific example of female masculinity, others that she is a
lesbian who wishes she were more feminine, and others still that she is a prototypical transsexual
character. Focusing on the exemplary essays by Jack Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Jay Prosser,
I argue that the coexistence of mutually exclusive interpretations of Stephen Gordon's relationship to
her femaleness suggests that the novel is, in fact, a demand to readers to unmoor identity from sex and
to recognize what I call “sexual indeterminacy.” Lesbian, transgender, and queer theory's tendency to
elide the literariness of literary objects and their reliance on critique as the primary mode of reading and
argumentation have made it impossible for critics to see that the novel is explicitly about what cannot
be settled

 Kramp, Michael. “The Resistant Social/Sexual Subjectivity of Hall's Ogilvy and Woolf's
Rhoda.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 52 (2016): 29 - 63.

Throughout the early twentieth century, psychologists, medical doctors, and sexologists debated and
determined our modern understanding of the female homosexual. Rooted in a dialectic between the
theories of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, the discourses of the lesbian emphasized the perversity
and deviancy of the homosexual woman. Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf engage this discussion and
offer two powerful fictional portraits of women who challenge the developed notion of the lesbian as
either a broken heterosexual or a mannish woman. The characters of Hall and Woolf, moreover, resist

24
the heterosexualization of culture which mandates that individuals must be stable agents as either
male or female, heterosexual or homosexual

 Stockton, Kathryn Bond. “Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer”.”
(2006).

Shame, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame , has often been a meeting
place for the signs “black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have
been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been
embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic
delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and
why is it central to camp? Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory,
psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers
rarely, if ever, read together in a single study—James Baldwin, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, Toni
Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eldridge Cleaver, Todd Haynes, Norman Mailer, Leslie Feinberg, David
Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino—and reads them with and against major theorists, including Georges
Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani.
Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather,
seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other.
Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’
clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual
rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous
depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved ) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the
thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that
make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness

 Facco, Lúcia. “As identidades homoeróticas na literatura: de Hadclyffe Hall a Aretusa Von.”
(2005).

Este artigo e um trecho revisado e reduzido da dissertacao de Mestrado em Literatura Brasileira


intitulada Boca no trombone: literatura lesbica contemporânea, elaborada sob a orientacao do Prof. Dr.
Italo Moriconi, na Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, defendida em abril de 2003 e publicada
pelo selo GLS do Grupo Editorial Summus, com o titulo As heroinas saem do armario: literatura lesbica
contemporânea, em marco de 2004.  Neste estudo pretendo comparar o processo de (des)construcao
da identidade homoerotica nos textos: O poco da solidao, de Radclyffe Hall, publicado em 1928,
“Aqueles dois”, conto de Caio Fernando Abreu, publicado no livro Morangos mofados, em 1982 e
“Triunfo dos pelos”, conto de Aretusa Von, publicado no livro homonimo, em 2000

 Doan, Laura L.. “Fashioning Sapphism : the origins of a modern English lesbian culture.” (2001).

Introduction: "It's Hard to Tell Them Apart Today" 1 The Mythic Moral Panic: Radclyffe Hall and the New
Genealogy 2 "That Nameless Vice Between Women": Lesbianism and the Law 3 Outraging the
Decencies of Nature? Uniformed Female Bodies 4 Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in
the 1920s 5 Lesbian Writers and Sexual Science: A Passage to Modernity? 6 Portrait of a Sapphist?
Fixing the Frame of Reference

Pa 15

25
 Forster, Christine. “Very Serious Books.” Oxford Scholarship Online (2018): n. pag.

This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two
novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less
well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way
they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter
argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A
perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million
"surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as
especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with
authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in
the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression

 Baker, Sarah M. “Feet Down, New Planet: Exorbitance and Queer Futurities in The Well of
Loneliness, Lesbian Pulp Fiction, and Radical Feminist Manifestos.” Georgetown University-
Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (2018): n. pag.

“Feet Down, New Planet” explores exorbitance and queer futurities in The Well of Loneliness, lesbian
pulp fiction, and radical feminist manifestos. It extends queer theory to the texts as a way to expand
them beyond the limits of their original sociocultural publication contexts. This thesis examines models
of reproduction, queer embodiment, and world-building in The Well of Loneliness, lesbian pulp fiction,
and radical feminist manifestos in order to examine how the authors write worlds beyond the limits of
liberal feminist propriety, and imagine radical queer futures through oozing poetic sensibilities. “Feet
Down, New Planet” contributes to queer theories of excess by mapping a cartographic and affective
history of queer literary excess, and curates the exorbitant world-building frameworks Radclyffe Hall,
Valerie Taylor, Jill Johnston, and Valerie Solanas imagine

 Parker, Sarah. “Cherchez la femme: Looking for lesbian femininities in literature, 1850-1928.”
(2018).

Parker’s chapter focuses on the representation of lesbian femininity in the literature from the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, relating this to present-day femme identities. Parker begins by asking why
queer feminine identities have been overlooked in present scholarship, contrasting this with the focus
on female masculinity or butch identities. Through readings of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853), Eliza
Lynn Linton’s The Rebel in the Family (1880) and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Parker
reveals the complexity of lesbian femininities, particularly as they relate to ideas of family, class and
race. Whiteness emerges as a signifier of femme identity, problematically contributing the erasure of
black femme identities. In conclusion, Parker proposes an alternative tradition of femme identity,
inspired by Sappho and neo-Paganism, opening up contemporary understandings of lesbian femininity

 Busl, Gretchen. “Drag’s Double Inversion: Insufficient Language and Gender Performativity in
The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood.” English Studies 98 (2017): 310 - 323.

ABSTRACT Contemporary critics often object to the outdated, binary representations of gender and
sexuality present in two of the earliest lesbian novels, The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood, arguing
they have little to offer our modern conceptions of identity. This article re-examines these two texts
through the lens of “drag” performance to demonstrate that they prefigure Judith Butler’s gender

26
performance and testify to the contingency not only of identity, but also of language. These two early
twentieth century novels illustrate that not only are fixed categories insufficient for representing identity
in language, but that it is all but impossible to conceive of gender without being limited by existing
linguistic structures. Both Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes very clearly demonstrate that the sign
systems used to express identity—whether they be linguistic or performative codes—are not mediums
which represent any “truth” about inner reality, but are merely contingent upon pre-existing systems

 Doan, Laura L.. “Then and Now: What the ‘Queer’ Portrait Can Teach Us about the ‘New’ Longue
Durée.” Visual Culture in Britain 18 (2017): 18 - 34.

When we fix our gaze on a sexual object in the context of queer remembrance the pull toward a linear
narrative of homosexual emancipation is hard to resist. The use of queer portraiture in the Tate Britain’s
exhibition (‘Queer British Art, 1861–1967’), marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act
(1967), provides a good opportunity for reflecting on the limits and possibilities of expecting
resemblance across time. Identifying the sitter as an X binds us to a past remembered which
condenses all the messiness of sexual desire into the modern categories prevalent today, though this
approach to pastness entails risk in increasing rather than decreasing the distance between then and
now. Looking specifically at the portraits of two women prominent in London’s bohemian circles in the
interwar era (Radclyffe Hall and Una, Lady Troubridge) I wonder what is at stake in imagining the object
as like us

 Shaw, Kathryn. “‘ Physical disability ’ or ‘ hypochondria of pinchbeck passion ? ’ : The role of


sexology in the diagnosis of a lesbian identity in Britain , 1900-1930.” (2017).

In 1928 the British government was forced to confront female homosexuality during the obscenity case
against Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness. The publishers, Jonathan Cape, argued
that Hall had produced an honest account of sexual inversion; a medical congenital abnormality or
‘physical disability’, and was justified in informing her readership and pleading for social acceptance.1
Meanwhile, sections of the mass media reported that female homosexuality was nothing more than ‘a
sort of hypochondria of pinchbeck passion’, implying that same-sex female relations were a flawed and
temporary imitation of heterosexuality.2 Both descriptions originated from theories of the homosexual
circulated in the medical community since 1900; the former, which left the ‘invert’ innocent, and the
latter, which named a new and dangerous ‘pervert’. This paper shall argue that by 1930 the authorities
had utilised the sexological language to make the separate models synonymous, and were able to
diagnose and condemn a visible female homosexuality. Existing studies of lesbian history are
invaluable but have often been overshadowed by an effort to create a wider ‘lesbian and gay’ narrative
which has led to oversimplification. Whilst the LGBT+ community is a force for strength in modern-day
culture, a unified past is ahistorical. As Merl Storr commented, ‘the body of scholarship known as
“lesbian and gay studies” has produced a “lesbian and gay” history of sexuality – including sexology –
which has unwittingly flattened out some of the history’s contours’.3 It needs to be acknowledged that
the chronological paths taken to an LGBT+ present are highly gendered and therefore disparate. Michel
Foucault’s theory of sexuality suggested that the increasing scientific study of sex in the early 20th
century transformed homosexuality from an act into an identity.4 Historians such as Jeffrey Weeks
utilised this theory to create a narrative for male homosexuality which neatly tracked the positive
progression of the ‘sodomite’ to ‘homosexual’; the ‘pervert’ to ‘invert’.5 Yet, this narrative does not fit
women. Female homosexuality was never made illegal in Britain, so sexology formed the first public
acknowledgement. Far from being a key stage in the formation and liberation of the homosexual, for

27
women, sexology marked a diagnosis of abnormality and public condemnation of a previously invisible
behaviour

 Lundmark, Lisa. “De anormalas plats i skapelsen : Religiösa teman i romanen Ensamhetens
brunn.” (2017).
 Hall, Lesley A.. “‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering
women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain.” Women's History Review 25 (2016): 124 -
142.

In 1985 Sheila Jeffreys alleged that the rise of sexological discourse concerning female inversion in the
early twentieth century obliged women of the interwar period in the UK to reject female affection for
fear of being labelled lesbian. Several historians have demonstrated that sexological ideas gained very
little general currency before Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Research on specific
women suggests that such fears were less prevalent than surmised. An influential discourse invoking
tropes of emotional femininity, rather than inversion, was embodied in Clemence Dane's Regiment of
Women (1917), presenting female same-sex relationships as mired in morbid emotions and parasitic
manipulation. It had significant cultural resonance for well over a decade. A counter-discourse argued
that emotionally healthy, reciprocal female friendship might form a sustaining element for women
unable to marry. Stress, however, was laid on the need for self-knowledge and psychological
understanding

 Vicinus, Martha. “Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928.” (2004).

"Intimate Friends" explores the fascinating history of the erotic friendships of educated English and
American women over the 150-year period leading up to the 1928 publication
of Radclyffe Hall's landmark novel, "The Well of Loneliness". Distinguished scholar Martha Vicinus
explores all-female communities, liaisons between younger and older women, the female rake, and
even mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe
elusive and complex erotic feelings. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, Vicinus
brings to life a variety of well-known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the
predatory Ann Lister (who documented her sexual activities in code), to Mary Benson (the wife of the
Archbishop of Canterbury), to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris. In vivid and
colorful prose, "Intimate Friends" offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted
territory of same-sex desire

 Newton, Judith Lowder and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt. “Feminist Criticism and Social Change:
Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture.” (1986).

Contributors. Acknowledgements. Preface. Introduction: Toward a materialist-feminist criticism Judith


Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt. Part 1: Theory 1. Toward a black feminist criticism Barbara Smith 2.
Race and gender in the shaping of the American literary canon: a case study from the twenties Paul
Lauter 3. Constructing the subject: deconstructing the text Catherine Belsey 4. Ideology and the cultural
production of gender Michele Barrett 5. Writing the body: toward an understanding of l'ecriture feminine
Ann Rosalind Jones Part 2: Applied Criticism 6. Villette Judith Newton 7. Aurora Leigh Cora Kaplan 8.
Inverts and experts: Radclyffe Hall and the lesbian identity Sonja Ruehl 9. Shadows uplifted Barbara
Christian 10. From the thirties: Tillie Olsen and the radical tradition Deborah Rosenfelt 11. Romance in
the age of electronics: Harlequin Enterprises Leslie W. Rabine 12. Real Women Annette Kuhn. Index
28
Pag 16

 Roche, Hannah Elizabeth. “'The outside thing' : locating lesbian romance, 1903-1950.” (2016).

This thesis examines the relationship between romance and ‘the outside’ in the works and lives of three
modern lesbian writers: Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. I consider romance – in terms
of both literary genre and the articulation of amatory attachments and desire – as a heterosexual space
or plot upon which lesbian novelists have wilfully set up camp. The locating of lesbian romance in my
title refers to romance as space, to the theoretical and political positioning of lesbian writing, and to the
detection of lesbian themes in outwardly heterosexual novels. ‘The Outside Thing’ is taken from Stein’s
meditation on romance (‘An American and France’, 1936), which, I argue, marries ‘outside’ (or
expatriate) geography to ‘outside’ sexuality. ‘The Outside Thing’ might also define my methodology, as I
consider alternative readings of canonical texts and address the significance of works on the
peripheries. The thesis is presented in three parts: I. GERTRUDE STEIN Chapter 1 defines romance in
Stein’s terms, reading Q.E.D. as a prototype lesbian romance. Chapter 2 penetrates Stein and Toklas’
domestic and romantic arrangement, examining Toklas (and lesbian love) as an ‘outside thing’ in
relation to Stein’s work. II. RADCLYFFE HALL Chapter 3 challenges the popular view of The Well of
Loneliness as an ‘ordinary [romance] novel’, going on to posit the ostensibly heterosexual Adam’s Breed
as lesbian writing. Chapter 4 explores real-life romance in the affair between Hall and Evguenia Souline.
III. DJUNA BARNES Chapter 5 positions Barnes in a new romantic and theoretical space, proposing a
reading of her fiction and journalism as performative bisexual writing. Chapter 6 presents Nightwood as
a bisexual romance. My project intervenes in ongoing discussions about the relationship between
aesthetic obscurity and political radicalism, the middlebrow and the modernist, and the 'in' and the 'out'

 Rault, Jasmine. “Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In.” (2011).

Contents: Introduction Decadent perversions and healthy bodies in modern architecture Screening
sexuality: Eileen Gray and Romaine Brooks Accommodating ambiguity: Eileen Gray
and Radclyffe Hall Not communicating with Eileen Gray and Djuna Barnes Conclusion: staying in
Bibliography Index

 Rose, Fabien. “Oram Alison, Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender Crossing in Modern
British Popular Culture. New York, Routledge, 2007.” (2009).

Dans Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture, Alison
Oram questionne la pertinence de la periodisation qui prevaut en histoire de la sexualite et du
lesbianisme en Grande-Bretagne. Constatant que la plupart des etudes qui font de l’affaire entourant la
publication de The Well of Loneliness de Radclyffe Hall (1928) un point tournant pour l’etablissement
d’un lien entre lesbianisme et female masculinity portent sur les elites britanniques, l’auteure de..

 Jennings, Rebecca. “A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500.”
(2007).

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources - court records, newspaper reports, medical records,
novels, oral histories and personal papers - A Lesbian History of Britain presents the extraordinary
history of lesbian experience in Britain. Covering landmark moments and well-known personalities
(such as Radclyffe Hall and the publication and banning of her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness),
but also examining the lives and experiences of ordinary women, it brings both variety and nuance to
their shared history. In doing so, it also explores cultural representations of, and changing attitudes to,
female same-sex desire in Britain. The narrative is arranged chronologically and begins with the
accounts of a number of women in the 18th century who passed themselves off as men. The C18th &
29
C19th saw 'Romantic Friendships' between women and, later, the emergence of a science of sexuality,
and the concept of the female 'sexual invert". At the same time, 'New Women' were pursuing
independent careers, a self-confidence reflected in the publication of a number of novels explicitly
about lesbian experience. The 20s and 30s were characterised by parliamentary debates on lesbianism,
court cases and scandals, though, with two world wars, lesbian experiences were already changing, and
a newly vibrant lesbian 'scene', centred on bars and night-clubs, was emerging, supported by a growing
number of lesbian-oriented magazines and societies. The contemporary period has been marked by
political movements and campaigns, in which lesbians have been active, and increasingly vocal
debates surrounding the 'sex wars'

 Jivani, Alkarim. “It's Not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the Twentieth Century.”
(1997).

"Alkarim Jivani has fashioned a lively introduction to our queer brothers and sisters across the Atlantic."
--Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco, CA "An interesting primary source for comprehensive gay and
lesbian collections." --Library Journal It's Not Unusual is a lively, anecdotal account of lesbian and gay
Britain told through the testimony of those who lived through it all. What it was like to attend West End
premieres in the Twenties with a monocled, cross-dressed Radclyffe Hall. What signs and signals
lesbians and gay men used to recognize each other in the Thirties. How London became a "vast double
bed" during the blackout. Why camp humor defused tension among soldiers under fire during the
Second World War. What it felt like to undergo "treatment" at the hands of psychiatrists armed with
injections and emetics during the repressive Fifties. How, in the Sixties, the long battle for law reform
was fought and won. How gay men and lesbians partied through the Seventies and rallied together in
the Eighties, and what issues concern them in the Nineties. The clothes they wore, the books they read,
the music they enjoyed, the slang they used, the people they loved, the things that made them laugh,
and the things that made them cry are all vividly recalled. The result is a poignant and powerfully told
history that casts a new light on Britain in our century. 

 Frith, Simon. “Why Do Songs Have Words?” The Sociological Review 34 (1986): 106 - 77.

Dear Miss Radclyffe Hall, I yield to no one in my admiration of your words for 'The Blind Ploughman'.
They are a big contributing factor to the success of the song. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to pay
royalties to lyric writers. One or two other publishers may but if we were to once introduce the principle,
there would be no end to it. Many lyrics are merely a repetition of the same words in a different order
and almost always with the same ideas. Hardly any of them, frankly, are worth a royalty, although once
in a way they may be. It is difficult to differentiate, however. What I do feel is that you are quite entitled
to have an extra payment for these particular words, and I have much pleasure in enclosing you, from
Messrs Chappell, a cheque for twenty guineas

 Cook, Blanche Wiesen. “"Women Alone Stir My Imagination": Lesbianism and the Cultural
Tradition.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4 (1979): 718 - 739.

In literary history, were all things equal, 1928 might be remembered as a banner year for lesbian
publishing. In 1928 Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and Djuna Barnes's
Ladies Almanack were printed. But all things were not equal. Orlando was enthusiastically reviewed and
then trivialized and dismissed by all but the expected circles. Hall's Well was banned in England only to
become throughout western civilization the archetype of all things lesbian-the "butch," the tears, the
despair of it all. Djuna Barnes's frolicsome romp, privately printed for a limited and carefully selected
audience, was never seen again until 1972.

30
 Johnson, Matthew D and Claude J. Summers. “Gay and Lesbian Bars.” (2015).

Moreover, gay and lesbian bars occupy a significant place in gay literature and film. Many of the classic
gay and lesbian novels--such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), Gore Vidal's The City
and the Pillar (1948), James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), Ann Bannon's I Am a Woman (1959),
and Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973)--feature scenes set in gay bars. In literary works,
especially those before the 1980s, the gay bar is often depicted as decidedly unappetizing, sometimes
frightening--even demonic-and nearly always depressing. Such depictions may reflect a certain reality,
but in real life these bars also often provided much needed shelter to people who faced ostracism in
the larger community

 Dimock, Chase. “Crafting Hermaphroditism: Gale Wilhelm's Lesbian Modernism in We Too Are
Drifting.” College Literature 41 (2014): 45-68.

This article argues for a renewed interest in forgotten modernist lesbian author Gale Wilhelm through
an examination of her 1935 novel We Too Are Drifting . Aimed at a wide readership, Wilhelm’s novel
differs from the work of high-modernist lesbians like Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes with its
middlebrow sensibilities. Furthermore, it presents the hermaphrodite as a new metaphor for
conceptualizing lesbian identity in contrast to the dominant model of the invert espoused
by Radclyffe Hall’s famous The Well of Loneliness . Without engaging in explicit politics, entering into
clinical considerations of sexual psychology, or including gratuitously titillating scenes that the public
had come to expect with the subject of lesbianism, Wilhelm’s revolutionary gesture needs to be gauged
differently: it assumes the lesbian’s right to define her own existence as the a priori condition for writing
about lesbian love by focusing on how lesbian artists use visual media to express their identities and
desires.

 Love, Heather K.. “"Spoiled Identity": Stephen Gordon's Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer
History.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7 (2001): 487 - 519.

Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed—it is they, the weakest, who must
undermine life among men.”1 Nietzsche’s diatribe against the “born failure” in The Genealogy of Morals
anticipates a common reaction to the heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. A
few months after the novel’s obscenity trial, a verse lampoon titled The Sink of Solitude appeared,
mocking the fate of “pathetic post-war lesbians.”2 The following year Janet Flanner, writing more coolly
in the New Yorker, quipped that Hall’s “loneliness was greater than had been supposed.”3 From the
moment of its publication, readers balked at the novel’s melodramatic account of what Hall called “the
tragical problem of sexual inversion.”4 But the readers who have reacted most adversely to the novel’s
dark portrait of inverted life are those whose experience Hall claimed to represent. The Well, still the
most famous and most widely read lesbian novel, is also the novel most hated by lesbians themselves.
Since gay liberation Hall’s novel has been singularly out of step with the discourse of gay pride. One
reader, voicing a common reaction, said that she “consider[ed] this book very bad news for lesbians.”5
According to a model of readerly contagion not unlike the poisoning effect of ressentiment that
Nietzsche traces in the Genealogy, Hall’s account of Stephen Gordon’s life is a depressing spectacle
that must undermine life among lesbians. With its inverted heroine and its tragic view of same-sex
relations, The Well has repeatedly come into conflict with contemporary understandings of the mean

31
p-18

 Gever, Martha. “Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Self-Invention.” (2003).

Before the rise of celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and k.d. lang, lesbians were rarely in the limelight and
the few that were often did not fare well. Times have changed and today's famous lesbians are popular
icons. Entertaining Lesbians charts the rise of lesbians in the public eye, proposing that celebrity has
never been a simple matter of opening closet doors, portraying "positive images," or becoming "role
models." Gever traces the history of lesbians in popular culture during the twentieth century,
from Radclyffe Hall and Greta Garbo to Martina Navratilova and Rosie O'Donnell, to explore the
paradoxes inherent in lesbian celebrity

 Knauer, Nancy J.. “Homosexuality as Contagion: From the Well of Loneliness to the Boy
Scouts.” Hofstra Law Review 29 (2000): 2.

In the political arena, there are currently two central and competing views of homosexuality. Pro-family
organizations, working from a contagion model of homosexuality, contend that homosexuality is an
immoral, unhealthy, and freely chosen vice. Many pro-gay organizations espouse an identity model of
homosexuality under which sexual orientation is an immutable, unchosen, and benign characteristic.
Both pro-family and pro-gay organizations believe that to define homosexuality is to control its legal
and political status. This sometimes bitter debate regarding the nature of same-sex desire might seem
like an exceedingly contemporary development. However, the ex-gay media blitz of 2000 represents
only the latest skirmish in a long-standing battle for ontological hegemony. Over 70 years ago, an
opening salvo was launched in the 1928 obscenity trials of Radclyffe Hall's novel THE WELL OF
LONELINESS (THE WELL). The novel detailed the life and loves of Stephen Gordon, a female invert, for
whom same-sex desire was depicted as an innate, god-given, and potentially noble characteristic.
Building on the congenital inversion theories of the early sexologists, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and
Havelock Ellis, Hall constructed the first popular articulation of a positive lesbian identity and argued,
without apology, for the invert's right to love. Thus, in THE WELL, female inverts are not only subjects -
they are juridical subjects. Hall uses a clearly articulated rights discourse throughout the book as her
characters assert their right to love and long for the right to protect (i.e., marry) their partners. Upon
publication, THE WELL encountered a hostile counter-narrative of homosexuality as contagion, resulting
in sensational obscenity trials on both sides of the Atlantic. Courts in New York and London adjudged
THE WELL obscene under the prevailing Hicklin rule, finding that it had the tendency to deprave or
corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and who might come in contact with
it. The media coverage generated by the trials and the attendant moral panic assured THE WELL a
position as the most influential lesbian novel of the twentieth century and marked the controversy as a
water shed in the development of lesbian identity. The controversy over THE WELL was also a water
shed in the evolution of anti-gay rhetoric. As one of the earliest examples in Anglo-American
jurisprudence of the battle between the contagion and identity models of homosexuality, the trials and
the larger socio-legal response provide an important link in our understanding of the continuing cultural
regulation of the expression of same-sex desire. In particular, they underscore the resilience of the
contagion model; the arguments used to suppress THE WELL are strikingly similar to those used today
to silence positive images of same-sex desire, relationships, and identities in a wide variety of contexts
including, education, public employment, and government funded programs. Indeed, the objections to
THE WELL expressed in 1928 in editorials, court decisions, and other official commentary, articulate the
six maxims of the contagion model of homosexuality that pro-family activists continue to advance to

32
this day and that continue to inform a wide range of policy choices and judicial decisions. First and
foremost of these maxims is that homosexuality is a freely chosen vice, not a valid medical or scientific
category. Accordingly, homosexuals can not excuse their behavior by claiming that they are "born that
way." Second, homosexuals prey on innocent victims. This is especially dangerous because "normally
sexed" individuals, particularly children or young adults, are very easily lured into experimenting with
homosexual practices, thereby accounting for homosexuality's contagious quality. Third, homosexuals
have no shame and insist on flaunting their depravity in public. Fourth, the demands of homosexuals
extend beyond mere tolerance. Fifth, this a battle to the end for the future of society. Lastly, because
homosexuality can so easily infect normal people, particularly children, any public image of
homosexuality that is not negative, (including simply the presence of an openly gay individual, such as
an assistant scout master or a teacher), sends a dangerous message that must be forbidden, silenced,
and repressed. Today, obscenity laws no longer stop the publication of lesbian romance novels, but
state-mandated or enforced spheres of silence continue in numerous areas and play an important role
in the on-going regulation of same-sex desire. These areas are not merely remnants of intolerance left
over from a less enlightened time. They are hotly contested political sites where opposing
understandings of homosexuality vie for supremacy.

 Rudy, Kathy. “Losing My Religion.” Frontiers-a Journal of Women Studies 20 (1999): 68.

And what of that curious craving for religion which so often went hand in hand with inversion? Many
such people were deeply religious, and this was one of their bitterest problems. They believed, and
believing they craved the church's blessing on their lives. But, faithful they might be, leading orderly
lives, harming no one, and yet the church turned away; her blessings were strictly reserved for the
normal. -Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness 

 Parkes, Adam. “Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: 'The Well of Loneliness' and the
Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando.'.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 40 (1994):
434.

At Bow Street Magistrates Court on 16 November 1928, Sir Chartres Biron ordered the destruction
of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for
lesbianism. It is tempting to think that Hall got into trouble simply for raising the issue of lesbianism,
since female "sexual inversion" (as it was then known) was not legally recognized in early twentieth-
century Britain. A proposal to extend to women the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which outlawed
"acts of gross indecency" between men, ran aground in the House of Commons in 1921 because,
Samuel Hynes speculates, "men found it [lesbianism] too gross to deal with" (375). However, at least
two other novels published in the autumn of 1928, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women and,
more important, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, clearly broached the same subject, yet escaped official
censure. In Hall's case the aggravating factor seems to have been not the subject but the treatment.
Whereas Woolf's fictional biography, like Mackenzie's satire, sets out to make readers laugh, The Well
of Loneliness pleads the cause of sexual inversion by taking up an aggressively polemical stance. A
summary of Judge Biron's ruling in The Times (17 November) suggests that Hall provoked the British
authorities into legal action by preaching an unacceptable sexual doctrine in an earnest tone that
sought to deny the possibility of either laughter or moral censure. Conceding that Well "had some
literary merit," and that such a book "might even have a strong moral influence," Biron declared: But in
the present case there was not one word that suggested that anyone with the horrible tendencies
described was in the least degree blameworthy. All the characters were presented as attractive people

33
and put forward with admiration. What was even more serious was that certain acts were described in
the most alluring terms. In order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure
that her lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, appeared above reproach. Ironically, as Hall's biographer
Michael Baker has noted, it was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure (220). If
those virtues had been nonexistent, or at least laughable, as in Extraordinary Women, The Well of
Loneliness would have passed muster as having, if not a "strong" moral influence, at least not a bad
one. The question of the relation between obscenity and literature raised by Judge Biron prompted
some musings in the diary of Virginia Woolf, who attended Bow Street on 9 November, the first day of
the Hall trial: "What is obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject and the
treatment?" (Diary 3:207). Like many other literati, including E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf
went to the trial prepared to take the witness stand and speak against the obscenity charges. She was
not quite as committed to the cause of Radclyffe Hall as some recent critics have suggested, however.
(1) Like many of her Bloomsbury friends, Woolf seriously doubted Hall's qualifications as an artist,
finding her work too polemical. Bloomsbury's reservations ran so deep that eight days before the trial
Woolf wrote: "Most of our friends are trying to evade the witness box; for reasons you may guess. But
they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins" (Letters
3: 555). Woolf was relieved to be saved the task of defending Hall's novel in court by the magistrate's
decision that only he, and not the defense's array of "expert witnesses," could rule whether or not Well
was obscene: "In what cases is evidence allowable? This last, to my relief, was decided against us: we
could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art" (Diary 3: 207). When, as she put it, "the bloody
woman's trial" went to appeal on 14 December, Woolf did not attend (Letters 3: 563). Woolf's objections
to Well were not limited to an ostensibly aesthetic sphere; they also highlight crucial differences among
women in questions of sexual politics, questions which are ultimately inextricable from aesthetic ones.

 Faderman, Lillian. “Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth
Century to the Present.” (1994).

This text explores lesbian sensibility in 20th century fiction. From the verse of Sappho in 600 BC
to Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness", published in 1928, there is little women's writing that is
recognised as "lesbian". It is short because while romantic friendship between women was an accepted
social institution from the Renaissance to the 19th century, and sex between women appears to have
been a staple of pornography since the incarnation of that genre, the possibility of seeing oneself as "a
lesbian" had to wait until the emergence of English sexologists in the last decades of the 19th century,
who defined lesbianism as a social and sexual category. If by "lesbian literature" we mean work in
which the subject of lesbianism is the centre, the history is even shorter. Is there a "lesbian sensibility"
that can be identified in literature that may not be concerned specifically with lesbian sexuality?
Examining works as diverse as Willa Cather's "My Antonia", the poetry of Gertrude Stein, the fiction of
Carson McCullers, and the lesbian heroine in the novels of Margaret Atwood, the author seeks to
redefine the canon

P 19

 Nair, Sashi N. “Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Reading Romans à Clef Between the Wars.”
(2011).

Acknowledgements Introduction: Screening Desire in the Sapphic Modernist Roman a Clef 'Moral
Poison': Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness 'On her lips you kiss your own': Theorizing Desire in
Djuna Barnes' Nightwood 'Truth & Fantasy': Virginia Woolf's Orlando as Sapphic Roman a Clef 'Gertrude,

34
the world is a theatre for you': Staging the Self in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Conclusion: 'Two
alert and vivid bodies', Desire and Salvation in H.D.'s HER

 Tomas Monterrey: Queer Chrysalides in Tenerife: Radclyffe Hall and the Music of Eden – 


 Zacks, Aaron. “Conrad & the Performing Arts.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 54
(2010): 118 - 121.

that works against a tradition almost solely composed of discourses of male inversion. Bauer’s study
concludes with an examination of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a novel that she argues
“reinforces that within the scientia sexualis, issues of method, authority and the circulation of
knowledge were closely tied in to the gender of the subject—the theorist, theory and sexual identity
under scrutiny” (113). The different paths of investigation navigated in English Literary Sexology
culminate in this section, framing the intersections of scientia sexualis, literary methodology, and
experiential realities brought to fruition in Hall’s story of Stephen Gordon, a lesbian, or female “invert,”
whose sexual inversion is addressed in the narrative as a natural state. Bauer’s discussion of The Well
of Loneliness, considered a touchstone text in the formation of female same-sex sexuality, provides a
segue into the aftermath of “inversion,” a term that became lost in translation, so to speak, due to
changing ideas about sexology and psychology. After World War II, sexology became centered in North
America; Alfred Kinsey’s work serves as a representative example of this shift. Bauer posits that
investigations of translation—on its multiple operative levels—generate fruitful interrogations into the
production of modern sexual theory. English Literary Sexology fully addresses Bauer’s defined research
questions, though it possesses a number of typos and awkward constructions. (In addition to the
previously mentioned misdate, one sentence begins, “The today most famous response came from
Havelock Ellis...” [139], while another states: “... we find some indication that alongside the anti-same-
sex find sentiments that characterize the inversion narrative...” [102]). These distractions are amplified
within the context of the aggressive theoretical writing that requires the reader’s careful concentration.
This book is best suited for audiences already engaged at some level with the subject matter.

 Felber, Lynette. “Literary Liaisons: Auto/biographical Appropriations in Modernist Women's


Fiction.” (2002).

 Unhappy relationships are the stuff of fiction - or so Lynette Felber observes as she examines the lives
and fiction of five modernist women writers whose lovers were also literary figures. Focusing on Anais
Nin, Rebecca West, Zelda Fitzgerald, Radclyffe Hall, and H.D., she investigates the ways these female
authors made use of their relationships in their fiction. Whether heterosexual or lesbian, these women
struggled to assert the authority of their own literary voices and to achieve professional recognition
distinct from their partners. The modernist period, when British and American women first began to
exercise their newly granted political rights, provides a particularly interesting backdrop for this study of
literary appropriation. Using feminist and psychoanalytical theory, Felber views these emerging authors'
fictionalized struggles as reenactments of the process by which the self differentiates itself from the
Other. The literary liaison is the site where the female writer's professional identity is enacted,
contested, and finally empowered or suppressed. As she examines the impact of literary relationships
on modernist women writers, Felber reveals their preoccupation with attaining the status of "subject."
The writers discussed in Literary Liaisons are well known for their various work - Rebecca West for her
journalism, Anais Nin for her erotica, H.D. for her imagist poetry - as well as for their associations with
such celebrated partners as H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller. The conflicts reflected in
the five modernist women's writings stir a voyeuristic curiosity about the autobiographical truths that
may lurk behind every fiction. Literary Liaisons will appeal to all who are interested in women's fiction,
autobiography, and the culture of modernism
35
 Taylor, Leslie A.. “"I Made Up My Mind to Get It": The American Trial of The Well of Loneliness,
New York City, 1928-29.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 250 - 286.

FROM DECEMBER 1928 TO APRIL 1929, New York City attorneys, courts, and the public pondered “sex
matters,” “a delicate social problem,” and “one woman’s fight for social adjustment despite
abnormality.”1 When writers for the New York Times used these descriptions to convey the lesbian
theme of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness, they were participating in a scandal in which
normative values about “sexual explicitness” and the causes of sexual identity and gender were being
contested. The scandal forced publishing houses, vice societies, attorneys, and the courts to articulate
the manner in which a lesbian novel could—and could not—corrupt. The debate surrounding The Well of
Loneliness stands in stark contrast to the debate over lesbian representation in the play The Captive.
During the furor over The Captive between 1926 and 1927, New York courts ruled that lesbian and
deviant female heterosexual representation onstage was unacceptable. The New York legislature
capitalized on judicial opinion and amended the obscenity statute to prohibit plays with “sex
degeneracy” and “sex perversion.” Although the scandal over The Captive had quieted after April 1927,
the publication of The Well in December 1928 reignited the debate over lesbian representation. The trial
of The Well resulted in a verdict

 Merck, Mandy, Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright. “Coming out of feminism.” (1998).

Mother, Can't You See I'm Burning? Between Female Homosexuality and Homosociality
in Radclyffe Hall's The Unlit Lamp: Trevor Hope (University of Rochester)

P20

 Avery, Todd. “The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1928–1960: A Selected Edition


(review).” Modernism/modernity 16 (2010): 831 - 833.

831 Holden’s book makes a very strong case that marital status needs to be added to those areas we
deem foundational to the study of culture: race, class, gender, sexuality, national identity. Marital
status is wrapped up in all of these categories, as is clear from the author’s discussion of the role of
single people in raising children of imperial civil servants, the natalist and maternalist tensions
surrounding the childless in the years following both world wars, the insecurity of domestic workers and
laborers in the 1930s and after, and the desperation surrounding sexual practices like homosexuality
and masturbation rendered illicit by their removal from heterosexual monogamy. Scholars of literature
and culture, especially those who appreciated Catherine Clay’s British Women Writers 1914–1945:
Professional Work and Friendship (2006), will find particular value in Holden’s use of novels and films.2
Such authors and texts of note include Radclyffe Hall, Winifred Holtby, Edith Hull, C. S. Lewis, and Mary
Webb, as well as an assortment of young adult books representing dutiful daughters, bitter spinsters,
batty aunts, and adventurous uncles. Holden’s analyses of these texts are cursory, but she has opened
the door to a rich new field of study for those who would take her up on it. Her work could form the
foundation for deeper discussions of professional life, friendship, caretaking, sex, and love: those things
which gave meaning, albeit fraught meaning, to the lives of single men and women, lives we are only
now beginning to uncover

 Armstrong, Mary A.. “Stable Identity: Horses, Inversion Theory, and The Well of Loneliness.” Lit:
Literature Interpretation Theory 19 (2008): 47 - 78.

In the afterword to a collection of essays on The Well of Loneliness, Terry Castle conjures up the figure
of Radclyffe Hall dribbling a bas ketball in the Greatest Lesbian Writers of the World Basketball
Championship. Embarrassing though she is (‘‘huge baggy men’s underpants,’’ ‘‘godawful mopey look on
36
her face’’), Hall powers down the court. ‘‘She’s making us all look bad! She wants to be the Man!’’ cries
Castle’s narrator, accompanied by the frustrated howls of other queer literary luminaries (394). Too
late: the masculinized female invert that Radclyffe Hall both embodied and created cannot be ignored—
and Stephen Gordon, Hall’s alter ego and hero(ine) of The Well of Loneliness, remains the slam-dunk of
modern lesbian representation, a still-pivotal figure for thinking about queer female subjectivity and the
business of reading queerly. As this examination of The Well illustrates, however, even as the
homosexual emerges as that famous Foucaldian ‘‘species,’’ the queer subject does not materialize into
narrative with coherence—not even when she steps out in a form as hyper-articulated as Stephen
Gordon

 Jennings, Rebecca. “From ‘Woman‐Loving Woman’ to ‘Queer’: Historiographical Perspectives on


Twentieth‐Century British Lesbian History.” History Compass 5 (2007): 1901-1920.

Historiographical approaches to 20th-century British lesbian history have been shaped by a range of
political perspectives. Lesbian feminist historians writing in the 1980s and 1990s emphasised the role
of female friendships and lesbian relationships in supporting the lives and work of key figures such
as Radclyffe Hall, as well as the negative impact of patriarchal oppression. In the 1990s, definitions of
‘the lesbian’ and the notion of the interwar period as a defining moment in modern lesbian history were
challenged by queer and post-structural approaches, which encouraged an interpretation of categories
of sexual identity as unstable. The recent historical concern with geographies of sexuality has
prompted lesbian historians to explore the impact of space and the material world on the construction
of lesbian identity and experience.

 Taylor, Melanie A.. “’The masculine soul heaving in the female bosom’: Theories of inversion
and The Well of Loneliness.” Journal of Gender Studies 7 (1998): 287-296.

37

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