One Night in Maidenhead

Jean McNicol

• Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits by Terry Castle
  Columbia, 150 pp, £15.95, November 1996, ISBN 0 231 10596 7
• Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall edited by Joanne Glasgow
  New York, 273 pp, £20.00, March 1997, ISBN 0 8147 3092 2
• Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John by Sally Cline
  Murray, 434 pp, £25.00, June 1997, ISBN 8 0 7195540 X

‘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.

Vol. 19 No. 21 · 30 October 1997 » Jean McNicol » One Night in Maidenhead (print version)
Pages 19-21 | 4177 words