Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John Sally Cline Paperback

Radclyffe Hall was a legend in her own lifetime and her fame has never faded. She was also a lesbian, which became part of that legend. Christened Marguerite, a shy insecure child with golden curls and Victorian muslin dresses, she became, at a time when men alone wore the trousers, a flamboyant character who smoked small green cigars, cross-dressed in Chinese silk smoking jackets, and called herself John. In 1928, when she was forty-eight, her fifth novel, The Well of Loneliness, was banned for obscenity, despite protests from leading literary and political figures. The trial turned the book into a notorious bestseller and brought the author literary fame.<P>First a serious poet and novelist, then a notorious cause celebre, Radclyffe Hall was also a suffragist, a sometime feminist, a member of the Natalie Barney-Djuna Barnes Paris circle, and a Catholic convert who believed in spiritualism. Though she was a passionate believer in sexual loyalty, her blazing acts of infidelity lead her...