ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1920s, Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf were preoccupied with so-called "women's" issues; while those issues ranged from economic independence to freedom of expression, Woolf and Hall were simultaneously interested in the literary representation of same-sex female desire. This chapter investigates the way that Hall and Woolf both employed the fantastic as a means of codifying queer desire in seemingly anachronistic or impossibly transhistoric ways. Woolf's Orlando is most often put in conversation with Hall's most prominent novel, The Well of Loneliness, as both texts "struggle to represent a relatively new cultural phenomenon—homosexuality in women". Hall's forenote to the first publication of "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself" describes the story as "a brief excursion in to the realms of the fantastic". For much of the story, Miss Ogilvy is reasonably ordinary given the traditional markers of the designation "fantastic," while remaining overtly extraordinary given the expectations of her family.
