Radclyffe Hall [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONRadclyffe Hall was a legend in her own time and in the years up to and including ours. She was also a lesbian: a fact which became part of that legend. As a writer and a woman, Radclyffe Hall lived on the margins but then entered the mainstream, only to find that after several years of critical success the mainstream rejected her.In 1928, when she was forty-eight, Radclyffe Hall created a sensation with her fifth novel. The Well of Loneliness. After a notorious and dramatic trial -perhaps the most famous in the history of British censorship law attended by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West, Rose Macaulay and many other eminent writers prepared to speak in its defence, the British courts banned the book for obscenity. It was taken to trial in America where the New York police arrested the publisher and seized over 800 copies of the book, again on charges of obscenity. The impressive list of writers who came to the book's defence in America included Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway and Edna Ferber. Although the Manhattan Magistrates also judged the book obscene, the Appeal Court later overturned the verdict in Hall's favour.Ironically the court cases turned the book into a best-seller both at the time and thereafter and turned Radclyffe Hall and her writings into a critical part of literary history and censorship politics.In her early career she was certainly not a polemical writer who set out to wave a banner or preach a gospel. She made her début as a lyric poet with five volumes of pastoral poetry - many of the poems set to music by well-known composers. 'The Blind Ploughman' became a national favourite and was sung before an audience of thousands in the Usher Hall. Though her poems were less interesting in form and content than her novels, they share many of the same preoccupations - a sense of kinship with nature, concern with love,