Radclyffe Hall

RADCLYFFE HALL, the pen name of Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, was born in Bournemouth, England in 1880 and was an English poet and author of eight novels. She was renowned for her open homosexuality, which was the subject of her best-known and groundbreaking novel, The Well of Loneliness, a semi-autobiographical work. The novel was highly controversial and condemned by the British; Sir Chartres Biron had all copies of the book destroyed. Later, a U.S. court decree vindicated the novel, and some years later the British ban was overturned. Her novel Adam’s Breed (1926) won both the Prix Femina and the 1927 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. The last novel she wrote was destroyed, at her request, after her death in 1943.