ABSTRACT
Towards the end of Radclyffe Hall's The Unlit Lamp (1924), the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincal town, overhears two young women discussing her. She recognizes them as women of the same “type” as her: unattached, independent, sexually ambiguous. They dress like her, and wear their hair cut in a similar style. But they seem to inhabit a different world: their lamps have very definitely been lit. Unlike her, they are aggressively intelligent and purposeful, “not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair.” At once envious of, and terrified by, their success, Joan has to acknowledge that she belongs to another age: Her place in the evolution of feminism is that of the “pioneer” who “got left behind.” She is, as one of her tormentors puts it, “what they used to call a ‘New Woman.’” 1
