Before such Knowledge: the fascist squire

Unidentified photographer. ‘Fascist Salute of a Classroom’, March 2026. Online. Promoter Digital Gallery. http://digitalgallery.promoter.it/items/show/1423.

Crumbs

Hall Biography, malvern, Malvern Groundworks, Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge

Tuesday, 3 January 2023

A view of the fascist dispositions of Hall and company.

Malvern Hills

Collecting Evidence

Yes, I am beginning to be really afraid of them, not of the one or two really dear Jewish friends that I have in England, no, but of Jews as a whole. I believe they hate us and want to bring about a European war and then world revolution in order to destroy us¹

There is extensive documentation regarding Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge’s fascist allegiances in practice, their antisemitism and the prejudices of other notable figures during the rise of fascism. They said a few things about Jewish folx, black folx, people outside their class. They had their sympathies and wrote letters to the editor on such matters. The list is long. Below is a chronology of all references directly quoted in published works on Hall and Troubridge.

Collecting evidence — the documented record, 1912–1945

Twenty moments · drag, swipe, or use the arrows

The record opens in 1912 with a letter sneering at the working classes,² runs through an American revolver carried for safety concerns about African Americans,³. The positions harden, across the 1930s, into active fascism: Fascist ribbons and black shirts, the flag flown beside the Union Jack,⁴⁵ an engraved rifle handed to the Fascist youth,⁶ a librarian informed on for stocking banned books;⁷ and, in the letters and diaries, a “Jew-ridden” Europe and approval of the racial laws.⁸

Hall reportedly “recoiled with horror” at news of the gas chambers;⁹ and Troubridge, writing her memoir two decades later, cleaned much of it away — Una the curious tourist,¹⁰ the rifle and the black shirts unmentioned, the politics reduced to “fear and dislike of the Germans”¹¹ and a dread of the “Godless Soviets”.¹²

The same hierarchies — of class, of race, of who was fit to reproduce — run through Hall’s fiction across two decades, in her own published hand.

Collecting evidence — the fiction, 1914–1936

Six works · drag, swipe, or use the arrows

Contains Hall’s verbatim language, including racist slurs.

None of this is secret or new, every line has sat for decades in the biographies and literature available to anyone who cared to gather it. Troubridge’s biography and letters published in Joanne Glasgow’s collection Your John – The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall contain most of the worst of it. The flag and the rifle are there, as well as the recoil to word of the “wholesale slaughter” of Jews¹³, the slur sits alongside praise, the novelist and the wealthy sapphist. There is no tidy story. Hall flew the Fascist flag and grieved the gas chambers, wrote the century’s most talked about lesbian novel and, with the very same hand, wrote of Jews being like locust.

Sit with it a while before deciding what it means.

Reactionary Evidence?

The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. It said to itself: ‘If seeing’s believing, then I don’t want to see — if silence is golden, it is also, in this case, very expedient.’

Radclyffe Hall, Well of Loneliness¹⁴

When it comes to Hall’s politics – if that is the right word – no one quite agrees on the word to describe it. On their website, the Harry Ransom Center applies the word ‘reactionary’¹⁵ – as do others (Laura Doan¹⁶ and Gillian Whitlock¹⁷). Somewhat contrastingly – Richard Dellamora writes that Hall is ‘a modern, not a reactionary’¹⁸ and Jana Funke writes that she is “staunchly conservative and reactionary” and also suggests that “it is necessary to reassess what have by now become clichéd and reductive views of Hall as a staunchly conservative and reactionary writer.”¹⁹ While it’s not possible to make a sweeping discourse analysis of Hall’s own most highly cited statements and the most highly cited literature on her, there are some nuanced views in many of the canonical biographies and literary criticism. In fact, I would argue that the various routes authors take to engage with a particular subject of Hall tend to reference those words and orient their own engagement through them.

Collecting evidence — the good word

Twenty-three descriptions · drag, swipe, or use the arrows

The questions to which she could find no answers, would pile themselves up and up in the darkness; oppressing, stifling by sheer weight of numbers, until she would feel them getting her under; ‘I don’t know — oh, God, I don’t know!’.

Radclyffe Hall, Well of Loneliness²⁰

The disagreement over the words to describe Radclyffe Hall’s politics, persona, and characterization is not just a byproduct of different historians and critics writing at different times. The conflict has become a central subject of Hall scholarship. Many of the authors explicitly note that no one can agree on how to characterize Hall, many suggest we should revisit the reductive. Whilst there are many labels to add to the pile, when you lay them out in a line, there remains a vast, contradictory, and somewhat mutually exclusive critical reception of Hall that launches their own arguments about how we should read her, her literature and the circumstances of the time – actively challenging the ways past critics have handled her legacy
.
Here is an assortment of a few of them over the past four decades.

Collecting evidence — the big hitters

Eight interventions · drag, swipe, or use the arrows

When one comes to a place like this, one feels horribly sad and humiliated. One feels that the odds are too heavily against any real success, any real achievement. Where so many have failed who can hope to succeed? Perhaps this is the end.

Radclyffe Hall, Well of Loneliness²¹

If there is one meta-narrative of Radclyffe Hall scholarship is that Hall is important. At the same time, Hall’s legacy functions as a theoretical battlefield – the biographical and cultural-critical are equally as important to the course queer and feminist theory has taken, alongside the grand march of FLINTA progress – and these are not bad things. Looking at how this corpus legitimizes their own analytical framework by pointing at a previous wave of critics and accusing them of misreading, patronizing, or improperly dismissing Hall is key to understanding not only Hall, but the trajectory of progress itself.

Collecting evidence — The Well of Discontent

Eight critics · drag, swipe, or use the arrows

And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. A voice like the awful, deep rolling of thunder; a demand like the gathering together of great waters. A terrifying voice that made her ears throb, that made her brain throb, that shook her very entrails, until she must stagger and all but fall beneath this appalling burden of sound that strangled her in its will to be uttered.

Radclyffe Hall, Well of Loneliness²²

What do we do with the legacy left in the biography, history, literature and critical analysis?

What to do after such knowledge?²³

Citations

Baker, Michael. Our Three Selves: The Life of Radclyffe Hall. William Morrow & Company, 1985.

Brittain, Vera. Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? London: Femina Books, 1968.

Castle, Terry. Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. London: John Murray, 1997.

Costello, Katherine A. “A No-Man’s-Land of Sex: Reading Stephen Gordon and ‘Her’ Critics.”Journal of Lesbian Studies 22, no. 2 (2018): 165–84.

Dellamora, Richard. Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Doan, Laura. “‘Woman’s Place Is the Home’: Conservative Sapphic Modernity.” In Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, edited by Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, 91–106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Funke, Jana, ed. ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Glasgow, Joanne, ed. Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Hall, Radclyffe. “The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes” and “The World.” In ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall, edited by Jana Funke. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

———. The Forge. London: Arrowsmith, 1924.

———. The Sixth Beatitude. London: Heinemann, 1936.

———. The Unlit Lamp. London: Cassell, 1924.

———. The Well of Loneliness. London: Jonathan Cape, 1932.

Harry Ransom Center. Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers, 1806–1962. MS-01793. Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Digitised collection launched February 2022.

Hovey, Jaime E. “Gallantry and Its Discontents: Joan of Arc and Virtuous Transmasculinity in Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West.” Feminist Modernist Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2018): 113–37.

Lamontagne, Kathryn G. “‘Our Three Selves:’ Radclyffe Hall and Mabel Batten’s Lived Catholicism.” Ecclesial Practices 9, no. 1 (2022): 69–85.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

———. “Hard Times and Heartaches.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 4, no. 2 (2000): 115–28.

———. “‘Spoiled Identity’: Stephen Gordon’s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History.”

More from Malvern

Be thyself: Self-Fashioning Hall

Quotes and Places: the Malvern’s in Biography and Theory

Field/Notes: Cartographing an an/archive

A Well of Discrepancies: Hall and Company

Field/Notes: Through a Hall Backwards

Field/Notes: Archival Plot-twists

Field/Notes: negotiating with friends

Field/notes: Brendon Hill

Church Hall and Other Specters

Field/Notes: Domiciliation Fever (or sweltering shelter)

Field/Notes: The Agency of the Pivot

Citations

1
Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (London: John Murray, 1997), 361, citing Radclyffe Hall to Evguenia Souline, 22 March 1939. ↩︎
2
Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 137. ↩︎
3
Jana Funke, ed., ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 631. ↩︎
4
Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Quercus, 2014), 285. ↩︎
5
Harry Ransom Center, Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers, 1806–1962 (bulk 1912–1951), MS-01793, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, digitised collection launched February 2022. ↩︎
6
Souhami, 297. ↩︎
7
Souhami, 320. ↩︎
8
Souhami, Trials, 2014. ↩︎
9
Cline, Radclyffe Hall, 361, citing Radclyffe Hall to Evguenia Souline, 20 December 1942. ↩︎
10
Una, Lady Troubridge, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hammond Hammond, 1961), 67. ↩︎
11
Troubridge, Life and Death, 150. ↩︎
12
Troubridge, Life and Death, 150, 156. ↩︎
13
Sally Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (London: John Murray, 1997), 361, citing Hall to Evguenia Souline. ↩︎
14
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), 135. ↩︎
15
Harry Ransom Center, “A Biography on Pink Paper,” in Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers, MS-01793 (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 2022), 714. ↩︎
16
Laura Doan, “‘Woman’s Place Is the Home’: Conservative Sapphic Modernity,” in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, ed. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 103. ↩︎
17
Gillian Whitlock, “‘Everything Is out of Place’: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary Tradition,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 3 (1987): 579. ↩︎
18
Richard Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), xv. ↩︎
19
Jana Funke, introduction to ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall, ed. Jana Funke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 4–5. ↩︎
20
Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 111. ↩︎
21
Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 450. ↩︎
22
Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 506. ↩︎
23
The phrase ‘after such knowledge’ is borrowed from a TS Elliot poem that addresses forgiveness (that happens to invoke some anti-semitic tropes). See T. S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’, in Ara Vus Prec (London: The Ovid Press, 1920), 11–13; Later Eva Hoffman, in her book on the Holocaust invoked the same words. See Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2005). ↩︎