The trials of Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall turned the literary establishment of England upside down when The Well of Loneliness was published. Put on trial under the Obscene Publications Act, she was spurned by the Bloomsbury set, including Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, both of whom once had lesbian relationships themselves. Radclyffe Hall, however, was always a controversial figure. Born in 1880, she was an unwanted child who at age fifteen, upon her fathers death, inherited more than three hundred thousand dollars. She immediately liberated herself from her family and began to affect the manners and demeanor of a young man. She was a political reactionary, a Catholic convert, a member of the Society for Physical Research, and an aggressive and successful conqueror of a series of women as her lovers. This major new biography by Diana Souhami, will stand for decades to come as the definitive look at one of the twentieth century's most intriguing characters.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction, Spiritual. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.