Endorsements

This book presents a wide range of previously unpublished works by Radclyffe Hall. These important new materials significantly broaden and complicate critical views of Hall's writing, and offer vital new perspectives on this often misunderstood writer. Hall is well-known as the author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), but the diversity of her literary work and the complexity of her ideological perspectives remains underappreciated. The writings made available here for the first time correct such narrow approaches, demonstrating the stylistic and thematic reach of Hall's writing, and covering such diverse topics as outsiderism, gender, sexuality, race, class, religion and the supernatural, and World War I. Together, these texts shed a new light on unrecognised or misunderstood aspects of Hall's intellectual world. The book includes Hall's unfinished novel The World, nine short stories, and radically different early drafts of 'Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself' and of a section of The Well of Loneliness. These materials are published together with a substantial 20,000-word introduction, which situates Hall's unpublished writings in the broader context of her life and work. Overall, the volume invites a critical reassessment of Hall's place in early twentieth-century literature and culture, offering rich possibilities for teaching and future research. It will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of English literature, modernism, women's writing, and gender and sexuality studies, as well as to general readers. -