Michael Baker – Our Three Selves
On the connection to Morton: “Morton Hall… is such an important influence in Stephen’s early life that she treats it as almost a living friend. She talks to the house, confides in it, feels its ‘moods’, and misses it when she is away”.
On Morton’s symbolic value: “Morton represents abiding values and comforting certainties in a changing, bewildering world”
On Stephen’s personality at Morton: “Stephen Gordon is a heroine who, like her predecessors, is highly sensitive, deeply moral, abnormally protective, painfully lonely, and resolutely self-sacrificing”.
 
Heather Love – “Spoiled Identity”: Stephen Gordon’s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History
On Morton as an institution of power: “For Stephen, Morton signifies public acceptance and recognizability guaranteed by the institutions of property, inheritance, and social hierarchy”. “It also offers an intimate space in which the orderly domestic relations that such publicness presumes can flourish”.
On Morton as a moral and historical anchor: “Morton remains the sign of absolute value, the privileged site of continuity, human connection, and moral rectitude”. “Its brick-and-mortar impassivity exists in an endless narrative present; it seems to watch over the rest of the novel”.
On Stephen’s athleticism and pride: “Though Stephen is not a purely desperate or lonely character—she experiences happiness, pride, joy, desire, and interest—she never approaches the tranquil self-respect that Morton projects”. “This deprivation is not without its pleasures: the novel is filled with descriptions of the voluptuous pride that Stephen takes in her appearance, her strength, and her abilities”.
 
Loralee MacPike – A Geography of Radclyffe Hall’s Lesbian Country
On Morton shaping Stephen’s class identity: “Stephen’s sense of herself as an entitled human being is established through her love for Morton, the ancestral family home, within whose class-determined bounds she comes to know and value her difference from others”.
On Morton as cradle: “At Morton she develops into her sexual self; its green mounded hills are the mother-body she comes to love, the geographical representation of the mother she longs to possess and the self which will surrender to and be possessed by the mother/lover”.
On Stephen’s misguided belief that Morton can legitimize her sexuality: “Stephen naively shows her reliance on place to consolidate conflicting meanings, to resolve reality”. “Yet she cannot bring herself to dispossess Anna, a fact whose bitter realization prevents her from even trying to bring Mary ‘home’…”,.
 
Gillian Whitlock – “Everything Is out of Place”: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Literary Tradition
On Morton as a patriarchal structure: “Stephen’s home, the country seat of Morton, is quintessentially English”. “As the lynchpin of a hierarchical, patriarchal order it is ‘well-timbered, well-cottaged, well-fenced and well-watered'”.
On the gendered spaces within Morton: “Two strongly gender-determined kinds of identification with the natural world around Morton are presented; both house and surroundings are compartmentalized in terms of gender”,. “The ‘perfect proportions’ of the mother’s drawing room and her absorption, emotional and intuitive, in the natural world contrast with the ‘menacing, prophetic’ domain of the father’s study…”.