The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

will follow it more or less reasonably if emancipation comes by rather liberal degrees.’ But Una’s ‘misery’ about sex, her equating of it with infection, made her horrified at the prospect of her daughter’s desires. No friend of Andrea’s was ever invited to the house.

Ten days later, on 29 January 1926, Minna phoned early in the morning to say that Troubridge had died at a tea dance at Biarritz the previous day. Una made no pretence of sorrow. But she went into a scud of activity about money. She spent the morning on the phone to the Admiralty and in the afternoon saw the Accountant General there. Troubridge’s total estate was £452 18s 11d. Her annual pension was to be £225 a year, Andrea’s £25. ‘To mother’s’, Una wrote in her diary that night. ‘Viola very nice, Minna intolerable. John and I home to a quiet evening.’

Advised by John’s solicitor, Theodore Goddard, Una appealed to the Admiralty for this pension to be increased. She presented herself as a penniless widow with a child to support. She checked on life insurance policies, put in a claim with the Officers’ Families Fund, wrote to her stepson Tom Troubridge about Andrea’s school fees and ‘wrote her mind’ to her mother who was ‘more damnable than ever’ when Una called at her house to retrieve her marriage certificate.

A requiem mass was held for Troubridge at Westminster Cathedral. Andrea had leave from school. Una braved the Troubridge congregation while John walked the dog. There was no hint of acceptance of her by them. ‘She was waiting for me when I got home’, Una wrote in her diary. Troubridge’s obituary in The Times spoke of his distinguished prewar career and of the escape of the Goeben. ‘His subsequent employment was not of a kind to afford him much opportunity of distinction. Personally he was well known and highly popular in many cities in Europe.’

As if to assert paternal authority John took Andrea to mass at Brompton Oratory then drove with her back to Harpenden. For Una, Troubridge’s death added to the burden of what to do with his child, the unwelcome reminder of a former life, the parcel to be passed. ‘She cld stay away 2nd part of hols’, she wrote in her diary about Andrea’s Easter break.

Una’s appeal for an increased pension went before an Admiralty tribunal and was successful. ‘Much rejoicing, hurrah’, she wrote. John ordered her a new hat from Maud Moore’s and they saw Noël Coward’s Hay Fever for the second time and ‘howled with laughter’. There was greater rejoicing when Adam’s Breed was published in March. Una sent out more than 200 postcards by way of publicity. They drove to the bookshop Miller & Gill in the Charing Cross Road to see the window banner advertising it. Within a week Hatchards and The Times Bookshop were reordering. Within three weeks it was on its fourth reprint.

Mindful perhaps of the pearls and purple coat she had once been given, the passion she once inspired, Violet Hunt wrote to say that she was nominating it for the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize. Two Femina prizes were awarded annually, for an English and a French novel.

Newman Flower had expected more modest sales and was surprised by the book’s popularity. Radclyffe Hall took courage from this success. She resolved now to speak out and put her name to a novel that told, she said, ‘the truth about one of the greatest tragidees that exists in the scheme of nature’.

I wished to offer my name and my literary reputation in support of the cause of the inverted. I knew that I was running the risk of injuring my career as a writer by rousing up a storm of antagonism; but I was prepared to face this possibility because, being myself a congenital invert, I understood the subject from the inside as well as from medical and psychological text books. I felt therefore that no one was better qualified to write the subject in fiction than an experienced novelist like myself who was actually one of the people about whom she was writing and was thus in a position to understand their spiritual, mental and physical reactions, their joys and their sorrows, and above all their unceasing battle against a frequently cruel and nearly always thoughtless and ignorant world.

She used the term congenital invert as if it was a category with specific attributes. It was true that the company she kept was lesbian (upper class, cultured, moneyed lesbians between the wars). She knew their dress codes, mores, love affairs and news. And Una had read aloud germane passages from works of contemporary sexology. But Radclyffe Hall embraced contentious theories with disconcerting ease. Her true courage was to speak out, to break silence, declare her sexual orientation, use pronouns truthfully and write ‘she kissed her on the mouth’. Other lesbian writers shielded themselves behind allusion and romans-à-clef, where only the in-crowd knew the hes to be really shes.

In daily life Radclyffe Hall was an invert with standards to maintain and pleasures to procure. She fired the cook and employed a new one, Miss McDonnell. The secretary, Miss Clark, was replaced by Miss Ward, then Miss Ward by Miss Whibley. Bradley went and Una refused to be driven by his replacement Birdkin who she said was rude. His successor, Kayberry, crashed the car and was ‘discharged’. John then hired a chauffeured Daimler from Harrods for £800 a year plus a shilling a mile, ‘livery supplied’.

Again the house began to ‘vamp’ her. Sappho the parrot bit her and was despatched to the zoo. Una endured more injections and vaccines for her vaginal problems. Dr Curtis said ‘there was no real means of getting her right except by an operation. ‘Damn him to hell!!!’ John wrote when his treatment hurt Una. She bought her peaches and sweets.

In the summer she left ‘board and wages for six weeks’ for Miss Mclean, McDonnell and Dickie and set off with Una for France, thermal baths,