'Honey, she's a forerunner, that's what she is, a kind of pioneer that's got left behind. I believe she's the beginning of things like me.' Radclyffe Hall has long since been left behind, along with Joan Ogden, the heroine of her first novel, The Unlit Lamp, and the character to whom these words refer. The young women she had overheard, Ogden thought, were 'aggressively intelligent ... not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair; women who did things well ... women who counted and who would go on counting ... They might still be in the minority and yet they sprang up everywhere.' This passage, with its untroubled description of lesbianism, is unusual in Hall's fiction - although it is true that even these confident young women exist only to point up Joan's own failure in this respect and others. The portrayal of homosexual life in Hall's famous novel, The Well of Loneliness, is much more gloomy and melodramatic, and bears little resemblance to her own not terribly tragic life.

LRB 30 October 1997 | PDF Download