“So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction,” she added.Ĭape, who also published such literary daredevils as Ian Fleming and James Joyce, was willing to take the risk. “I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world,” she wrote to him in a letter cited in Sally Cline’s biography Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John ( public library). In the spring of 1928, encouraged by the success of her previous writings, Hall warned her publisher, Jonathan Cape, that her next book would require a high degree of faith on his behalf, for she was taking a great personal and cultural risk. Hall, born Marguerite Radclyffe Hall but known to her loved ones as John, was an out lesbian who dressed in men’s clothes in a society and era when same-sex love was considered not only immoral but legally punishable. With the publication of The Well of Loneliness ( public library), the way gender and sexual identities are formulated and articulated was forever changed. In July of 1928, three months before the publication of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel Orlando - a classic celebrated as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” which subverted censorship and revolutionized the politics of same-sex love - the English novelist and poet Radclyffe Hall (August 12, 1880–October 7, 1943) set into motion a cultural revolution.
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