In Malvern, a circular walk through a complex decade in the life of Radclyffe Hall. From White Cottage to St Wulstan’s across the ridge, and down again, the route meanders from Catholic devotion and literary endeavour to self-fashioning and fascist disposition. A walk reflecting a life that is often contested but rarely re/viewed directly in…
Looking for Radclyffe Hall in Malvern
Church Hall and Other Specters
Domiciliation Fever (or sweltering shelter)
negotiating
Fieldnotes: Brendon Hill
Cottage Industries
A Well of Discrepancies: Hall and Company
Plot-twists
Through a Hall Backwards
Know thyself, be thyself: Self-Fashioning Hall
Cartographing an an/archive
The Agency of the Pivot
She was conscious of somehow remembering all wrong, of her memory being distorted and coloured—perhaps by the endless things she had seen since her eyes had last rested upon that cave.…”
Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1926)
The account of Hall and her companions in this guide to Malvern is rebuilt from the institutional record outwards, locating disagreements between biographers, theorists and historians. What you will find is not as a collection of facts, but a geolocated mosaic of curated and sometimes conflicting narratives. This approach presents a nuanced understanding of a complex decade, focusing on the psychological and emotional currents that drove Hall’s life and artistic output, while also acknowledging the partial and selective nature of the historical record itself.
Una Troubridge’s The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall (1961) opens the field from inside the relationship — a partner’s post-humorous memorial of her companion of twenty-eight years. Lovat Dickson’s Radclyffe Hall at The Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle (1975) follows as the first outside biography — a publisher-historian’s chronicle written with access to Una’s late circle and organised around the trial named in its subtitle. Michael Baker’s Our Three Selves (1985) anchors the biographical canon as the first comprehensive scholarly life and the source most subsequent biographers’ route through. Sally Cline’s Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (1997) reframes the project explicitly around Hall’s queerness and the ‘John’ persona; Diana Souhami’s The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (1998) centres the obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness as the defining event. Lastly, there are the words of Hall and Troubridge together (1919) from their report On a Series of Sittings with Mrs. Osborne Leonard published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
Hall’s scholarly biographers view Malvern through key lenses that equally inform views of the landscape — Terry Castle (2003) places Hall in the lesbian literary canon, Richard Dellamora (2011) reads her through her writing, Loralee MacPike (1994) maps her geography, Kathryn Lamontagne (2022) takes up her Catholicism. Laura Doan (2001) and Hannah Roche (2018) press against the framings themselves, troubling the categories and inherited critical chains the earlier scholarship took as given. Jana Funke’s edition of ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall (2016) opens material beyond the Well-centric canon; her co-edited critical edition of The Well of Loneliness with Roche (Oxford University Press, 2024) provides a scholarly apparatus.
The institutional record — directories, census returns, HM Land Registry, the 1910 Finance Act survey, misc. public communications — sits as a third interlocutor, holding the exterior of property and movement against the interior the others variously fill in. Each author is uniquely positioned, bringing their own set of skills to the equation.
Maps
Sources
Baker, M. (1985) Our Three Selves the Life of Radclyffe Hall. William Morrow & Company.
Castle, T. (2003) ‘Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943)’, in T. Castle (ed.) The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 632–648.
Clarke, M. (2021) ‘I need never have known existence’: Radclyffe Hall and LGBTQ+ visibility, The National Archives. Available at: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/i-need-never-have-known-existence-radclyffe-hall-and-lgbtq-visibility/ (Accessed: 12 July 2022).
Clarke, R.C. and Radclyffe-Hall, M. (1913) ‘The Blind Ploughman’. London: Chappell & Co., Ltd.
Cline, S. (1997) Radclyffe Hall a Woman Called John. Faber & Faber.
Dellamora, R. (2011) Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dickson, L. (1975) Radclyffe Hall at The Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle. London: Collins.
Fradgley, E. (2022) Malvern’s role in early lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, Malvern Gazette. Available at: https://www.malverngazette.co.uk/news/19984550.one-first-lesbian-novels-set-worcester-malvern/ (Accessed: 6 July 2022).
‘Hanley Castle Assessment No. 301-400’ (1910). (Inland Revenue: Valuation Office: Field Books). Available at: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C942530.
Harry Ransom Center (2022) A Biography on Pink Paper, Harry Ransom Center. Austin: University of Texas. Available at: https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/teaching/radclyffe-hall-una-vincenzo-lady-troubridge/biography/ (Accessed: 8 July 2022).
HM Land Registry (2022) ‘Current title plan HW120171 – 260 Wells Rd, Malvern WR14 4HD’. online: GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/search-property-information-land-registry.
Hovey, J.E. (2018) ‘Gallantry and its discontents: Joan of Arc and virtuous transmasculinity in Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West’, Feminist Modernist Studies, 1(1–2), pp. 113–137.
Joyce, R. (2016) The Creation of Radclyffe Hall, Women’s History Network. Available at: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/the-creation-of-radclyyffe-hall/ (Accessed: 11 August 2022).
Landry, D. (2001) The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831. Springer.
de Lauretis, T. (1991) ‘Perverse Desire: The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian’, Australian Feminist Studies, 6(13), pp. 15–26.
Newton, E. (1984) ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 9(4), pp. 557–575.
Radclyffe-Hall, M. (1908) A Sheaf of Verses: Poems. London: John and Edward Bumpus Ltd.
Radclyffe-Hall, M.A. and Lady Troubridge, U. (1919) ‘On a Series of Sittings with Mrs. Osborne Leonard’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 30(78), pp. 339–554.
Readman, P. (2018) Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity. Cambridge University Press.
Rebanks, J. (2020) English Pastoral: An Inheritance. London: Penguin.
Roche, H. (2018) ‘An “ordinary novel”: genre trouble in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness’, Textual practice, 31(1), pp. 101–117.
Shoard, M. (1999) A Right to Roam. London: Oxford University Press.
Souhami, D. (2014) The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. London, England: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Troubridge, L.U. (1961) The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall. London: Hammond Hammond.
Worcester News (2005) Lesbian Literature, Worcester News. Available at: https://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/7473389.lesbian-literature-with-health-warning/ (Accessed: 6 July 2022).