Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall (12 August 1880 – 7 October 1943), more known under her pen name Radclyffe Hall,[1] was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature.

[3] As Hall grew older and gained more autonomy, she realized that she had enough inheritance money from her father to live without working or marrying.

In 1907 at the Bad Homburg spa in Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten (1856–1916), a well-known amateur singer of Lieder.

It follows Joan Ogden, a young girl who dreams of setting up a flat in London with her friend Elizabeth (a so-called Boston marriage) and studying to become a doctor but feels trapped by her manipulative mother's emotional dependence on her.

Its length and grimness made it a difficult book to sell, so Hall deliberately chose a lighter theme for her next novel, a social comedy entitled The Forge (1924).

[16] It sold well, was critically acclaimed, and won both the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize, a feat previously achieved only by E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

Published in 1928, The Well of Loneliness deals with the life of Stephen Gordon, a masculine lesbian who, like Hall herself, identifies as an "invert".

Although The Well of Loneliness is not sexually explicit, it was nevertheless the subject of an obscenity trial in the UK, which resulted in an order for the destruction of all copies of the book.

British composer and bon vivant Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners, wrote a roman à clef titled The Girls of Radcliff Hall, in which he depicts himself and his circle of friends, including Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as lesbian schoolgirls at a school named Radcliff Hall.

The novel was written under the pseudonym Adela Quebec and published and distributed privately; the indiscretions to which it alluded created an uproar among Berners' intimates and acquaintances, making the whole affair widely discussed in the 1930s.

Although its primary targets were James Douglas, who had called for The Well's suppression, and the Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, who had started legal proceedings, it also mocked Hall and her book.

Her sense of guilt at being depicted in a drawing that she saw as blasphemous led to her choice of a religious subject for her next novel The Master of the House.

[22][23] At Hall's insistence, The Master of the House was published with no cover blurb, which may have misled some purchasers into thinking it was another novel about "inversion".

Hall lived with Troubridge in London and, during the 1930s, in the small town of Rye, East Sussex, noted for its many writers, including her contemporary the novelist E. F. Benson.

[29] Many of Hall and Troubridge's surviving papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, including a manuscript of The Well of Loneliness, notebooks, diaries, and correspondence.

[30] Typescript copies of Hall's love letters to Evguenia Souline, written during the late 1930s and early 1940s, are held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.