ABSTRACT
Radclyffe Hall wrote her first novel, The Unlit Lamp (1924), about lesbian love but did not become famous for defending the infamous until she published The Well o f Loneliness in 1928. This novel was banned in England, translated into eleven languages, and became “the one novel that every literate lesbian in the four decades between 1928 and the late 1960s would certainly have read.” 1
Contemporary feminist critics find piety toward Radclyffe Hall diffi cult and appear relieved that they can at least applaud her courage in risking sapphic subject matter. They are embarrassed by her writing style, by the suffering she portrays, and by what they deem her misog yny. Lillian Faderman and Ann Williams in “Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Image,” Dolores Klaich in Woman + Woman, and Blanche Cook in “ ‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination’: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition” all deplore the self-pity and self-loathing” in Hall’s lesbian heroes.2 Jane Rule in Lesbian Images frankly accuses Hall of be lieving men superior to women and of worshiping patriarchy.3 All these critics imply that the alleged poverty of Hall’s psychological vision is justly mirrored in her ineptitude as a writer, in her “turgid and maudlin” style.4 Both Rule and Cook ascribe this poverty of vision to Hall’s reading Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing.5
