The Well of Loneliness : Not a Lesbian but a Trans Novel

 

While its literary value has been questioned, and many of its values now appear outdated, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness still holds a place as a beacon for sexual self-discovery, writes Hephzibah Anderson in BBC Culture's Banned Books series.

When a book has been banned on grounds of obscenity, a reader may be forgiven for coming to it with certain expectations. In the case of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, those expectations are decidedly misleading. For all the clasping of hands and flushing of cheeks that fill its nearly 500 pages, this is no Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Both were published in 1928 and subsequently banned, but whereas DH Lawrence described his protagonists' trysts in vocabulary that would still necessitate asterisks here, Hall stops at the bedchamber door. Aside from a kiss that is "full on the lips, as a lover", the coyly phrased "that night they were not divided" is as racy as The Well of Loneliness gets.

The controversy of course stemmed not from what was being done so much as who was doing it with whom. If Lady Chatterley caused a scandal by showing lust to be no respecter of class boundaries, Hall's novel was still more shocking because its protagonist, despite being named Stephen Gordon, is a woman, and her supposedly masculine proclivities extend far beyond her name. She weightlifts and refuses to ride side saddle; she gets her clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker and longs to cut her hair short; and from a young age she's prone to unusually intense feelings for other women.

In early adulthood, those girlish crushes blossom into a torrid affair with a bored American housewife, Angela Crossby. After Stephen's mother, Lady Anna, finds out and banishes her from the family home, Stephen becomes a writer and travels to Paris, where she's taken under the wing of a lesbian salonnière. Later, she serves in the ambulance corps during World War One and falls for fellow servicewoman Mary Llewellyn – she from whom Stephen will be "not divided".

The novel chronicles her nascent understanding of differences she's sensed in herself for as long as she can remember – differences dubbed "queer" behind her back. However, what truly sealed its fate when it landed in the dock at Bow Street Magistrates Court mere months after publication is the case it dares to make for recognition and tolerance of Stephen's sexuality. Hear her plea at the novel's fevered end: "Rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!" Not only is this a novel that strives to humanise the experience of outcast lesbians, it also argues for equality.

In 2019, newly revealed papers from Hall's archive at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center showed that thousands of readers had written to her to protest the novel's ban. "It has made me want to live and to go on," wrote one. Unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism wasn't in fact illegal in the UK in 1928, though that position should not be mistaken for tolerance. In fact, Stephen's prayer was destined to grow only more radical-seeming for some decades to come, and for generations of women – and men – on their own difficult passages to sexual self-discovery, The Well of Loneliness became a beacon.

 Speaking in a recording for the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Archive, a reader named Rene Sawyer, who was a teenager when the book was finally republished in 1949, explained its importance: "To me it was my bible. To me: it had every aspect of tenderness, of love, of heartache, of anguish, of problems – physical and mental problems – it had everything in that book. Which for me was a lifeline at that time."

If the book's historical and cultural significance is unquestionable, its text inevitably feels dated almost a century on. There's Hall's language, for starters. The first edition carried an "appreciation" by her friend Havelock Ellis, the sexologist whose theory of "sexual inversion" she supported, and his word "invert" – until then restricted to scientific literature – appears throughout Stephen's story.

Also jarring is the apologetic way in which Stephen's sexuality is framed, and the sheer pessimism surrounding Hall's depiction of gay life. As a devout Catholic, it was no coincidence that she named her protagonist after the first Christian martyr, and ultimately, she has Stephen embrace drastic self-sacrifice in her love life.

The novel has been slated, too, for its limited depiction of lesbianism as being so determinedly butch, it might almost seem a form of heterosexuality. And it's been called bi-phobic for the way it depicts Mary Llewellyn, who has relationships with men as well as with Stephen, and misogynistic for the way in which it denies her any say in her own future. Its descriptions of gay men, meanwhile, read like crass caricature. There's also its racism and classism, which can be shocking to encounter in a text that's gone down in literary history as being so radically progressive.

Pulp fiction

Nor is there any getting away from the fact that this is simply not great literature. The book is long-winded and full of stilted dialogue. Change a few pronouns and in some ways, it resembles the pulp romances of its era. Writing in The Times in 2008, Jeanette Winterson didn't mince her words, declaring that "The Well of Loneliness is one of the worst books yet written".

As with other banned books, this is a novel whose status is intrinsically linked to its having been censored. As Professor Laura Doan, who co-edited Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, tells BBC Culture, "In a way, the function of The Well of Loneliness is to convince you that lesbianism matters – lesbianism matters so much that the government can ban us and silence us, and that works very well to put you on the cultural map."

In recent years, however, discussion of the novel has been turbocharged by fresh debate. This time, the controversy stems less from its content than from the extent to which we choose to view it through the lens of 21st-Century gender identity politics. A woman who dresses like a man, goes by a man's name, and is described as being "midway between the sexes": could it be that one of the world's most famous lesbian novels has all along been a trans novel? Whatever you conclude, there's no denying that this book continues to challenge received beliefs and to polarise readers, sometimes in ways that not even its author could have anticipated.

 Born in Bournemouth on 12 August 1880, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall did not have an easy childhood. Her wealthy, philandering father left the family when she was a baby; her mother, an American who'd already been divorced once before and was prone to violent outbursts, rejected her daughter's boyish ways. She later remarried an Italian singing master, and there are hints that he abused Hall.

At the age of 21, Hall came into a substantial sum of money from her father, giving her the security and freedom to leave home. She's said to have written poems and songs from the age of three, and in her twenties, published some books of poetry. She was encouraged by her first long-term lover, amateur singer Mabel Batten, to try her hand at short stories, and was then persuaded by a publisher to write a novel. Her first, The Unlit Lamp, was published in 1924. Two years later, her fourth, Adam's Breed, won a clutch of prizes and sold 27,000 copies in its first three weeks.

Its success emboldened her to risk writing The Well of Loneliness. By then, Batten had died and Hall was in a relationship with Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge. The pair were as "out" as it was possible to be in 1920s England – a life made easier, undoubtedly, by the privileges of wealth and class, but there were furtive elements to their existence all the same. Troubridge supported Hall's decision to publish The Well, and in the spring of 1928, Hall wrote to her publisher, Jonathan Cape, to warn him: "I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world". She added: "So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction".

Is it autobiographical? Despite very different childhoods, there are certainly physical similarities to be spotted between Stephen and her creator: both are tall and "handsome in a flat, broad-shouldered and slim-flanked fashion". Stephen is her protagonist's given name – having been convinced she'd be born a boy, her father decides "Stephen" will work equally well for a girl – but from her mid-twenties, Hall was known to her intimates as "John", a nickname given her by Batten. Like Stephen, she wore men's clothes.

The novel garnered positive reviews in The Times Literary Supplement and Time and Tide but no critic was as convinced of its potency as James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express. Certain that it would contaminate and corrupt English fiction (his words), he wrote an article damning it as "unutterable putrefaction", notoriously declaring: "I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel". The book should be withdrawn, he thundered, or else the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, must act to suppress it.

On trial

It was sensationalist journalism but Joynson-Hicks was a man who had even found cause to object to a revised version of The Book of Common Prayer. He threatened Cape with criminal proceedings if the book wasn't withdrawn. Cape complied, though not without first licensing the rights to Pegasus Press, an English language publisher in France. Inevitably, copies found their way back into Britain and a trial ensued – with the Home Secretary claiming the novel "supports a depraved practice and that its tendency is to corrupt, and that it is gravely detrimental to the public interest".

 Among the writers who rallied to the novel's defence were EM Forster, Vita Sackville-West and George Bernard Shaw, though not all were convinced of its artistic merits. Virginia Woolf, for instance, thought it a "pale tepid vapid book" and dreaded having to take the stand for it. She needn't have worried: the magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled that authors could not testify as literary merit was irrelevant. On 16 November 1928, he found the novel to be obscene on the basis that it had the ability to corrupt, ordering its immediate removal from circulation. An appeal the following month similarly failed, with judge Sir Robert Wallace labelling The Well as "more subtle, demoralising, corrosive, corruptive, than anything that was ever written".

The judgements did nothing to dent support for Hall, who appeared in the courtroom wearing a leather driving coat and Spanish riding hat. She was described by the Daily Herald as "well-chiselled", and at the conclusion of the obscenity trial, according to the Daily Express, two women approached her from the crowd, took her hand and kissed it.

Suppression would be the making of both the novel and its author's reputation and yet in the decades since, this supposed Sapphic survival guide has continued to attract plenty of criticism from diverse quarters. In the 1970s, for instance, it became the focus of a backlash from Second Wave feminist critics for its patriarchal worldview. And by 2017, Winterson still hadn't warmed to it – although she chose it as the book that helped her come out, and argued that "A book can be bad and still have a place in history". Writing this time in The Guardian, she asserted: "The Well reads like a misery memoir long before they were invented. It's the fictional story of Stephen Gordon and her struggles with the fact that she thinks like, acts like, loves like and wants to be a man. Radclyffe Hall had no idea that sexuality is a spectrum, not a binary".

Hall's beliefs definitely complicate the book's legacy. Contrary to what might be expected of a pioneering lesbian author, her politics were reactionary at best. As an expat living in Italy in the lead-up to World War Two, she not only supported Mussolini's Fascist government, she also supported its censorship – of books. And if Victorian womanhood wasn't for her, she fully supported it for others, believing that a woman's place was in the home.

For Professor Doan, much has changed in terms of how the novel is discussed. "When you read it today you do feel that there's a lot in it that makes you feel pretty embarrassed by it," she says, noting that its racism, for instance, was scarcely talked about even a couple of decades ago.

These days, she prefers to direct anyone interested in learning more about Hall to Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, a short story written in 1926 in preparation for The Well. This story holds the key to the novel's real meaning, Doan believes. "To me, that story is about a human who is trapped in the wrong body, has been designated as a female and doesn't feel like a female and has a fantasy of becoming a male. There's no desire or love or romance in that story, and it made me realise that The Well of Loneliness isn't about love between women either."

Doan says she was never really convinced that The Well was a lesbian novel. As she explains, "It would be a better text to think of in the context of trans history. The publishers would be missing a commercial opportunity right now if they didn't try to push its cultural meaning to the trans community. If they want to identify a text that is at the start of the awareness in culture of the possibility of a trans existence, it's got to be The Well of Loneliness."

 So should we be using a different set of pronouns for Hall and Stephen? Some scholars, including Jana Funke, associate professor of English and Sexuality Studies at the University of Exeter and editor of The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, now use gender-neutral pronouns for both author and protagonist.

Maureen Duffy takes a different view, seeing Stephen's gender nonconformity as a function of Hall's discomfort with her own lesbianism. Writing in her introduction to the most recent Penguin Modern Classics edition, Duffy uses a pivotal scene from the novel to make her point: defending herself to her mother, Stephen justifies her sexual intimacy with Angela Crossby by explaining that she's "never felt like a woman". It's an argument Hall insists upon, Duffy suggests, "in order to justify her own very active homosexuality, which she embraced in spite of her espousal of Roman Catholicism".

It's worth noting that even readers for whom Hall clearly had a desire, however latent, to transition, The Well of Loneliness is by no means a straightforward text. Oliver Radclyffe, the trans author of a forthcoming monograph, Adult Human Male, changed his surname in homage to Hall. He's written on the website Electric Literature about how his feelings for the book changed as he undertook his own journey from Englishwoman raising four children in the Connecticut suburbs, to femme lesbian, to trans man. As he puts it, "it looked like Radclyffe Hall had not only been a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal misogynist with consensually-ambiguous domination issues".

Ultimately, it isn't possible to know whether or not Hall would have identified as transgender – a term not coined until much later – and labelling this long-dead queer person as such is innately problematic. What is certain is that more than 90 years after it was banned, this decidedly flawed piece of literature continues to make readers think anew. As Doan says, "We're confronting its complexity, and that can only be a good thing."

The Well of Loneliness: The book that could corrupt a nation. By  Hephzibah Anderson. BBC, November 22, 2022.

I can’t remember how I happened upon my copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which is a shame because it’s a first edition. The story in my mind is that it was sent to me by one of my mother’s friends shortly after I came out, but I’m pretty sure I first read it while I was still in the closet, so that can’t be right. Maybe I invented this story because of its narrative advantages; that a book written by an aristocratic English lesbian might be sent to me from an English aristocrat trying to endorse my lesbianism sounds like the sort of story I’d like to be true. I’m not sure that it happened that way, though, and the English aristocrat in question can’t remember either. She thinks it was The Price of Salt.

Anyway, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Lady Fitz-Waterford sent me The Well of Loneliness as a gift when she heard from my mother that I’d told my husband I was leaving him for a life of Sapphic love. I didn’t actually have a Sapphic lover at that point—I was living in the Connecticut suburbs and raising four children largely on my own, which left me a little short on time—but the principle of the matter was that I was a lesbian and, as such, would probably need a companion guide, an instruction manual to show me how to do it properly.

Radclyffe Hall had been born to a wealthy, respectable British family and so had I; she grew up in the English countryside and so did I; she was a writer and so was I. Charitably, I’m going to assume that Lady Fitz-Waterford hadn’t actually read the book—or its famously depressing ending—and that her intentions had been supportive, not cautionary.  

It’s not a very good book. At best, the writing is dated. At worst, it’s embarrassingly mediocre. But its place in history is unique. Up until its publication in 1928, the English ruling classes had been pretending that sex between women didn’t happen—in case innocent young girls were corrupted into thinking it might be fun to try—so the book was banned as soon as it came out. Of course, the furor surrounding the censorship only served to broadcast across the country that lesbian sex was very much a thing and paved the way for Djuna Barnes to write the much better (and more sexually explicit) novel Nightwood, which must have annoyed the British establishment immensely since it was entirely counterproductive to their original aim.

But Nightwood was not the book I read multiple times, nor was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which was published shortly afterward, because I wasn’t looking for literary excellence; I was looking for answers, and each time I read The Well of Loneliness I somehow managed to find them.

The first time I read it I wanted confirmation that the sacrifices I needed to make in the pursuit of true love would be worth it. I was idealistic and naive, certain that my internalized homophobia was the only obstacle standing between myself and eternal happiness; I just needed to figure out how to let go of my past—and the wealthy, white, heterosexual world in which I’d been living—so I could find the woman of my dreams. I devoured The Well of Loneliness in one sitting because I thought it was a book about love and loss, and at the time I felt as if I might lose everything.

The novel’s female protagonist—named Stephen in a surprisingly progressive act of gender-fuckery that I decided not to focus on too closely during that first reading—also had to leave the familiarity and comfort of her homeland before she could find true love, since Paris was the only place to be a lesbian in those days. The book was peppered with longing descriptions of the English countryside, the loss of which could only be justified by Stephen’s desire to live openly with her girlfriend Mary. I could totally identify with this. I was living in self-imposed exile in America, and although I was fully prepared to sacrifice the English countryside at the altar of my desire for a lesbian relationship, I wasn’t so single-minded that I couldn’t indulge in a little sentimental nostalgia now and then.

What I couldn’t identify with, however, was Stephen’s ludicrous decision at the end of the book to send Mary back to England in the arms of a man—the slightly unremarkable Martin—to save her from a life of sexual depravity in Paris. This felt not only like an act of betrayal, but also one of gross stupidity. Wasn’t the whole point of the story that true love—specifically perfect, unadulterated lesbian love—should conquer all? Otherwise why would we be making all these sacrifices? But I reassured myself that lesbian romances weren’t permitted to have happy endings until at least the 1950s (hello The Price of Salt), so this was merely a narrative device that had been designed to rescue the book from censorship. In real life lesbian love would conquer all. Obviously. I mean, we are living in the twenty-first century now. We are allowed to love whomever we choose.

By the second time I read the book, I had grown a little more discerning. I’d divorced my husband, ditched most of my cis-het friends, found my queer community, and was in a complicated relationship with a woman who was sorely testing my faith in the all-conquering power of lesbian love. Yes, I was irrefutably gay, and yes, sex with women was unquestionably better than with men, but there was still something missing. I was looking for something else, something beyond my lesbian relationship, something that felt more like an identity.

Yes, I was irrefutably gay, and yes, sex with women was unquestionably better than with men, but there was still something missing.

Up until this point I’d presented as femme—due to a second type of internalized phobia that I wasn’t yet willing to look at—but the more comfortable I got with being a lesbian, the more certain I was that my internal dynamic was on the male end of the spectrum. And yet somehow the butch identity didn’t feel right. Memories surfaced of Stephen’s rakishness, her dandyish wardrobe, and I wondered whether there might be a way of being a masculine-presenting lesbian that was a little more foppish, a little less straight-up butch. So I pulled the book back down from my bookshelf.

I was surprised this time by how much page space was dedicated to Stephen’s masculinity, details that I hadn’t noticed the first time. I was looking for descriptions of the clothes she wore, but what kept jumping off the page at me were the moments when she seemed confused by her own body. These little revelations were hidden among the text like Easter eggs, but now they felt more visceral than the lengthy, angst-ridden passages dedicated to forbidden love. Stephen spoke of her discomfort about her “hard, boyish forearms,” “the strong line of her jaw,” which gradually grew into an anxiety she couldn’t name, a feeling of being lost, “a great sense of incompleteness,” and then, suddenly: “It’s my face,” she announced, “something’s wrong with my face.”

The sentence sent a chill down my spine. She’d put words to my feelings, voiced the thought that surfaced every time I looked in the mirror. From inside my muffled state of denial, I could hear her trying to acknowledge her own deep-rooted fear of her emerging masculinity, her powerlessness over a body that seemed to be trying to turn male against her will. 

But for the most part, the rest of the book—when it wasn’t indulging in exhausting descriptions of anguished love—concentrated on Stephen’s desire for gender equality, for a position in society, for the respect of the ruling classes. There was something uncomfortable about her mimicry of upperclass, old-school masculinity—I knew men like these from personal experience and I didn’t like them—but I was interested in her friendship with Martin and her desire for male companionship, although the ending still annoyed me. I understood that Stephen had some kind of martyr complex, but the insistence that Martin take her lover was beginning to look less like an act of grandiose self-sacrifice and more like an act of overt misogyny. Why hadn’t Mary been allowed any say in the matter?

It was around this time that I decided to name myself for the author. I’d just had a story accepted by the New York Times and I didn’t want to write under a name bequeathed to me by either my father or my ex-husband (because patriarchy). Searching in a hurry for something fitting, I’d settled on Radclyffe, not only because she was an English lesbian, but also because she bore an uncanny resemblance to my grandmother, whom I had adored. Naming myself Radclyffe somehow felt like honoring both my grandmother and my lesbianism at the same time, so Radclyffe I became.

By the third time I read the book, I was specifically looking for the things I’d been trying to avoid seeing in the previous readings. I’d addressed my internalized transphobia and accepted my trans-masculinity, and I wanted to find out whether in a moment of uncanny foreshadowing—or perhaps subconscious intention—I had named myself for someone who might also have been trans. 

I was aware that this was a purely theoretical exercise. The difference between butch and trans is one of self-identification—because there isn’t an objectively defined line on either side of which cis and trans people fall—and, given that the term transgender wasn’t coined until 1965, there would be no way to accurately surmise how Radclyffe Hall might identify today. The only label Stephen applied to herself was that of “congenital invert,” which appears to conflate sexual orientation and gender identity, so it’s difficult to extrapolate from the text how much of her anxiety was related to her masculinity, and how much to her gayness.

She spoke of “the terrible nerves of the invert … running like live wires through her body … causing a constant and ruthless torment,” and how she must “drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed upon her spirit,” which sounded suspiciously like gender dysphoria to me, but this described how she felt in childhood, before she had control over her own presentation. I wanted to see if I could find evidence of continued discomfort after Stephen’s butch identity had been actualized; a clue that, like me, identifying as a masculine-presenting woman—and therefore still technically female—hadn’t been enough to relieve her gender dysphoria.

But mostly what I found instead were oblique references to her envy of cis-het masculinity, most notably through the eyes of her dog, who is unapologetic about his preference for male company and always somehow manages to make Stephen feel slightly less than, as if he can smell a whiff of the man about her but is really only humoring her because he loves her. And I couldn’t understand how I’d managed to overlook Stephen’s undeniable misogyny for so long: the superiority, the condescension, the control she exerted over the women she claimed to love.

Radclyffe Hall paints Mary as an ingenue—consistently referring to her as “the girl” or “my child”—enthralled by Stephen’s superior intellect, whose greatest joy is apparently found in mending Stephen’s clothes, cleaning her house, or hovering silently by her side at the Parisian artists’ salons. It was all beginning to feel a little like literary masturbation, as if The Well of Loneliness was an instruction manual written specifically for Hall’s own partner, Lady Una Troubridge, who by all accounts took it to heart and became exactly the kind of “wife” she’d been instructed to be.

I also wasn’t sure whether my new awareness of—and aversion to—these overtly gendered roles was the result of my having worked so hard to purge them from my own life, or a general evolution into a more empathetic, mature human being, or a side effect of early transition. But I was rubber-necking toxic male behavior everywhere now—a precautionary act of vigilance against adopting the same as I became progressively more masculine—so I suspected it was probably a combination of all three.

And yet, I still couldn’t make a clear call on Stephen’s gender until in the final chapters I finally caught a glimpse of something that might speak to a trans identity. Instead of seeing the dismal ending as a betrayal of true love, as I’d done the first time, or as an irritating act of martyrdom as I’d done the second, in this third reading Martin seemed to represent not just the masculine friendship Stephen craved or the male privilege she envied, but the body she wanted to become. At the end of the penultimate chapter, when she decides to bequeath her lover to him, she “found that she was holding his hand.” This strange act of physical contact now made the transaction seem almost supernatural, as if Stephen had sensed that in the absence of gender-affirming surgery, her “incompleteness” could only be resolved by transference into an actual male body, in this case Martin’s.

I decided to do some more reading—of her biographies, letters and lesser known stories—to see if I could bolster this theory. Eventually, I found a short story published a few years later, in which a female protagonist transforms without warning into a prehistoric man while exploring a cave on the English coast. In “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” the author finally seems to rid herself of all inhibition, exposing a desire for masculinity so extreme that she actually manifests as a caveman, complete with supplicating, half-naked female. It’s almost impossible to read this glaringly obvious symbolism as anything other than a fundamental desire to transition, particularly since she ends the story by killing off the protagonist’s female body.

So I finally had an answer, although the research it had taken to get there left me feeling a little queasy, since it looked like Radclyffe Hall had not only been a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal misogynist with consensually-ambiguous domination issues. For a brief moment I wondered how I could reconcile myself with bearing the name of someone whose views were so diametrically opposite to mine, until I remembered that ugliness can coexist with beauty, that good people can do bad things, and that we can’t always judge the actions of someone in the past based on our own standards in the present, particularly if that involves devaluing the impact they’ve had on our future. Because however problematic Hall’s position on women, race, and class might seem today, she was still a radical progressive in her own time, and her determination to break through the constraints of her gender not only helped to build a society in which trans people like me could eventually exist, but also one in which I could move away from my own unprogressive background with far greater ease.

As guidebooks go, The Well of Loneliness was far from perfect, but celebrating its existence feels more important to me now than dissecting the flaws of its author. The path from cis-het-presenting to queer or trans isn’t an easy one—I don’t know anyone who has managed to navigate it without falling into a few holes along the way—and let’s face it, sometimes we need someone with a bit of bullheaded persistence to hack through the undergrowth and clear a trail for us, however clumsily they may do it, however unlikable it might make them. My own history isn’t exactly unblemished, but if we lived in fear of exposing our faults, then we’d never write our stories, and the one thing I’m certain of is that more of our stories need to be heard. And if I can hold some compassion in my heart for Radclyffe Hall, in all her messy, dysfunctional, human complexity, then maybe I can remember to do the same for myself.

I Found My Queer Guidebook in “The Well of Loneliness”. By Oliver Radclyffe. Electric Literature, February 15, 2022.

Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness was subjected to a vicious campaign of attack led by the Sunday Express for its depiction of lesbian relationships, eventually being suppressed and censored in the UK as a piece of “obscene libel”. But the author’s own papers, which are set to be digitised, reveal the outpouring of support Hall received from members of the public around the world, who wrote to thank her for creating, in her heroine Stephen Gordon, a character with whom they could identify.

Seen today as a seminal work of gay literature, The Well of Loneliness tells of the “invert” Stephen Gordon, who realises from a young age that she is attracted to women, dresses in masculine clothes, and falls in love. Hall, a lesbian herself, wrote it to “put my pen at the service of some of the most misunderstood people in the world”. At its raciest, it goes no further than “she kissed her full on the lips, as a lover”, with a night of passion described as “that night they were not divided”. It ends with Stephen’s plea: “Give us also the right to our existence!”

Sunday Express editor James Douglas led a campaign against the novel, writing in his paper: “In order to prevent the contamination and corruption of English fiction it is the duty of the critic to make it impossible for any other novelist to repeat this outrage. I say deliberately that this novel is not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library.” Despite support from writers including Virginia Woolf and EM Forster, it was banned in the UK until 1949, after Hall’s death. But newly revealed papers from the author’s archive, which are set to be digitised by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas alongside those of her partner, the artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, show that the novel was also supported by thousands of readers, who wrote to Hall in outrage at the ban.

 “The picture you paint of the poor invert should make everyone more charitable … No one could finish your book, Miss Hall, without donning a sword and shield forever in the cause of inverts,” wrote one reader from the US, where the novel was not withdrawn despite a challenge, a court declaring it not obscene.

“It has made me want to live and to go on … I discovered myself in Paris and I dreaded this thing which I thought abnormal,” wrote another.

In the UK, an 18-year-old man told Hall he had “experienced many of the terrors of the invert”, hailing her “truly marvellous but searing book”. Others offered to send money to help Hall in an appeal against the judgment, or wrote of how the book changed their perspectives. “At first it repulsed and disgusted, and then the pathos and beauty of it got me, and if I had it in my power to help those poor souls I would have offered my services,” wrote a London correspondent.

Dr Steven Macnamara, who has researched Hall’s papers, said she received “thousands of letters of support”.

“The letters demonstrate the public’s awareness that The Well of Loneliness was not an obscene novel, and that Hall had been unfairly and unjustly treated by the government and the media. Access to these letters, through the future digitalisation project, will enhance the importance and understanding of this groundbreaking novel for Hall’s contemporary readers,” he said.

 

In one letter, a married coal miner in Doncaster wrote that he had “marvelled at the bigoted outlook of so-called ‘thinking men’, who are ashamed to let broader minded folk than themselves delve into the great sex problems”. The miner added: “Some day we will wake up, and demand to know ourselves as we profess to know about everything else.”

The new project will see more than 38,500 images from Hall and Troubridge’s papers digitised and made available online in January 2021. Alongside Hall’s notebooks and drafts for The Well of Loneliness, the archive also includesdiaries, letters – including around 650 that Hall wrote between 1934 and 1942 to Evguenia Souline, a Russian émigrée with whom she had an extended affair – and evidence gathered by Hall’s American lawyer before her obscenity trial in the US in 1929.

In a telegram, physician Dr Logan Clendening writes that “it is incredible to the scientific mind that an honest and sensitive presentation in literary form of a subject familiar and tragic to every physician should be threatened due to the pornographic imagination of a censor.”

Ransom Center director Stephen Enniss said: “The richness and depth of this material goes well beyond the subsequent censorship and cultural controversies sparked by The Well of Loneliness.”

Jana Funke, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and author of The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, said the archive also includes early drafts of The Well of Loneliness, which are “more explicit in their depiction of lesbian desire and more affirmative regarding the protagonist’s gender non-conforming identity”. Hall dropped earlier sections from the book “arguably to try and make the book less scandalous – a strategy that obviously failed,” said Funke.

One chapter in an early draft, included in Funke’s book, begins with the protagonist having sex with a woman during wartime at the frontline. “They spoke very little, for the darkness was rent by intolerable noise, and by sudden swift flashes that penetrated even into this darkness between cracks in the war-scarred brickwork,” wrote Hall. “And something, perhaps this near presence of death, seemed to quicken their bodies into agonised loving, so that they felt the throb of their bodies in each separate nerve and muscle and fibre, so that they ceased to be two poor atoms, and became one transient imperative being, having reason for neither good nor evil – the primitive, age-blind life force.”

Funke said that when people read The Well of Loneliness, knowing that it was banned as obscene in the UK, “they are often surprised and disappointed to find that there is no explicit sexual content. It was banned simply because it argued that lesbian sexuality and gender non-conformity should be accepted by society.”

Hall and Troubridge, she added, “are internationally recognised as LGBTQ pioneers, and it is vitally important that audiences around the globe have access to their papers now and in the future”.

 ‘It has made me want to live’: public support for lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall over banned book revealed. By Alison Flood. The Guardian,  January 10, 2019

In July of 1928, three months before the publication of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel Orlando — a classic celebrated as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” which subverted censorship and revolutionized the politics of same-sex love — the English novelist and poet Radclyffe Hall (August 12, 1880–October 7, 1943) set into motion a cultural revolution. With the publication of The Well of Loneliness (public library), the way gender and sexual identities are formulated and articulated was forever changed.

Hall, born Marguerite Radclyffe Hall but known to her loved ones as John, was an out lesbian who dressed in men’s clothes in a society and era when same-sex love was considered not only immoral but legally punishable. In the spring of 1928, encouraged by the success of her previous writings, Hall warned her publisher, Jonathan Cape, that her next book would require a high degree of faith on his behalf, for she was taking a great personal and cultural risk. “I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world,” she wrote to him in a letter cited in Sally Cline’s biography Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (public library). “So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction,” she added.

Cape, who also published such literary daredevils as Ian Fleming and James Joyce, was willing to take the risk. Hall delivered. The manuscript she turned in was a pioneering inquiry into gender and sexual identity, part social protest against bigotry and part manifesto for equality.

She made her heroine, Stephen Gordon, both a lesbian and unambiguously likable: loyal, tenderhearted, often mistreated, and endowed with what Descartes called “nobility of soul,” that most admirable of virtues. Stephen was animated by one central question: “Why am I as I am — and what am I?” It echoed what young Leo Tolstoy in his diary nearly a century earlier: “This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” For queer people, this question has always been acutely alive, but especially in eras and cultures where not all answers have been acceptable. The devastation of that unacceptability is found in the damning words of Stephen’s mother: “This thing that you are is a sin against creation.” — words strikingly similar to those with which Oliver Sacks’s mother broke her son’s heart. Hall’s intention was that her novel would “speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority” — a minority to which she herself belonged, rendering the book both deeply political and deeply personal.

Many initial reviews were favorable. Some lauded Hall’s countercultural bravery. One reviewer, Vera Brittain, wrote that the novel “can only strengthen the belief of all honest and courageous persons that there is no problem which is not better stated frankly than concealed,” and that “persecution and disgusted ostracism have never saved any difficulty in the world.”

But the vociferous editor of the Sunday Express, a man named James Douglas, did what critics — especially self-satisfied male critics — do to this day upon encountering art they don’t understand or find personally objectionable: He argued that it was not a work of art but immoral propaganda and wrote that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” Douglas launched a concerted campaign to suppress the book, which rose all the way up to Britain’s Home Secretary — a man so conservative that, in addition to attempting to ban alcohol and nightclubs, he had opposed a revised version of The Book of Common Prayer.

 Despite an outcry by some of the era’s most venerated writers and intellectuals, Douglas’s tireless bullying pushed matters to court and a trial for obscenity began on November 9, 1928. (Lest we forget the gravity of those charges, a generation earlier Oscar Wilde had been sent to prison for his homosexuality under similar charges of obscenity.)

Hall’s publisher and his team mailed 160 letters to potential witnesses who would be willing to stand against the censorship. Many never responded. Some gave unimaginative pretexts for why they couldn’t help. H.G. Wells declined, saying he was going abroad; he might as well have claimed to be mounting his time machine. In a letter to her nephew penned eight days before the trial, Virginia Woolf lamented the collective cowardice behind the litany of excuses:

  “Most of our friends are trying to evade the witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins.”

Among the courageous were fifty-seven esteemed writers and scientists, many of whom were ready to defend the novel’s social and political function as a call for equality and freedom, despite doubting its literary merit. Vita Sackville-West — Woolf’s longtime lover and the inspiration for her own censorship-subverting queer classic — went to the trial ready to testify. The Bloomsbury set were particularly troubled on creative grounds. Lytton Starchey, one of Woolf’s dearest friends and a queer man himself, agreed to take the witness stand, but not without noting in a letter to E.M. Forster — also a willing witness — that “the book itself is pretty frightful.”

Woolf herself was reluctantly willing to be a witness on account of the novel’s political significance and her contempt for censorship, but dreaded defending what she considered to be a “pale tepid vapid book which lay damp & slab all about the court” — writing, in other words, afflicted with the malady of middlebrow. So when the magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled that writers couldn’t testify as experts on obscenity, only on art, which wasn’t permitted as evidence, she was immensely relieved to be dismissed from witness duty.

Woolf captured the larger significance of the trial in her diary:

“What is obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject & the treatment?”

A week later, Sir Biron ruled that the novel was obscene, ordering that it be destroyed and that the defendants pay court costs. The decision was appealed in a second trial — in which Rudyard Kipling was summoned and never actually used as a witness — but after deliberating for only five minutes, the five new magistrates upheld the original decision. Across the Atlantic, Alfred A. Knopf, who had acquired the American rights, cowered from publishing a book censored by its country of origin.

In a letter Woolf co-wrote with to E.M. Forster, she once again captured the grim enormity of the implications: 

“ Novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention [lesbianism]… Although forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? … Writers produce literature, and they cannot produce great literature until they have free minds. The free mind has access to all knowledge and speculation of its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo. A novelist may not wish to treat any of the subjects mentioned above but the sense that they are prohibited or prohibitable, that there is a taboo-list, will work on him and will make him alert and cautious instead of surrendering himself to his creative impulses. And he will tend to cling to subjects that are officially acceptable, such as murder and adultery, and to shun anything original lest it lead him into forbidden areas.”

And yet The Well of Loneliness made its way into the body of culture. In America, the publishers Pascal Covici (who would later join Viking and become John Steinbeck’s fairy godfather) and Donald Friede took a $10,000 bank loan — around $137,000 in today’s money — in order to purchase the rights from Cape. They enlisted the help of Morris Ernst, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, and set about defending the book against censorship. To protect booksellers from being targeted, Friede reached out to the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and offered to sell him a copy of the book directly. But even before Friede and Covici were taken to court, the book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first year — despite its price point at $5, twofold the average for fiction, proving Neil Gaiman’s insistence that “repressing ideas spreads ideas.”

Eventually, the NYPD invaded the publisher’s New York offices and confiscated 865 copies of the book. But under U.S. federal law, literary merit was allowed as evidence against changes of obscenity, unlike during the U.K. trial, so Covici and Friede assembled a formidable roster of writers to stick up for the novel — including Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Ernst argued for the novel’s value as a protest against intolerance and a tool of social justice. After a series of contentious legal battles, justice prevailed on August 19, 1929: New York’s Court of Special Sessions ruled that Hall dealt with “a delicate social problem,” which in itself didn’t violate the law and therefore merited her novel’s free circulation. All charges were dropped and Radclyffe Hall went on to become a cultural icon.

As Lillian Faderman writes in her excellent book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (public library), queer women in America came to call Hall “Our Matron Saint” and one mid-century op-ed proposed that the “inelegant word butch” be replaced with clyffe. Today, Hall’s influence can be traced to lesbian icons like Adrienne Rich, Jeanette Winterson, and Audre Lorde, and the cultural significance of her work finds no greater testament than in Lorde’s assertion the “visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

 

November 9, 1928: The Trial of Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf’s Exquisite Case for the Freedom of Speech. By Maria Popova. The Marginalian, November 9, 2016. 

Olivia by Olivia and Jacqueline Audry

“Now I must bid farewell to all that I love.” It’s a line that comes late in Olivia, and though it’s one of the many grandiloquent, intensely delivered emotions that buffet this strange and beautiful film along its winding way, this moment hits particularly strongly. It’s spoken by a disintegrating Miss Julie (Edwige Feuillère), headmistress of a girls’ boarding school, to a pupil, Olivia (Marie-Claire Olivia). At this point, Olivia’s eerie adoration of the older woman has reached epic, all-consuming proportions. The older and younger woman are not in a classroom, but in Olivia’s bed, where the two are locked in a sensual embrace that goes far beyond pedagogically appropriate behavior.

There is ambiguity here: what or who is it that she is bidding farewell to? Is “all that I love” the school itself, with its cadre of young, starry-eyed girls learning about Victor Hugo and Aeschylus, Chimène and El Cid? Or is it the frail Miss Cara, the vaporous woman across the hall who always seems to be recuperating from a mysterious illness? Or is it Olivia herself that Miss Julie truly loves? The romantic-tragic classicism of Miss Julie’s line of dialogue—she has announced her decision to leave the school following a scandalous incident—perfectly matches the visual composition of the supine Olivia cradled by her beloved mentor; at one point their lips are nearly touching, like an angel bestowing a kiss on a cherub.

It’s a highly unusual scene for a film made in 1951, but Olivia would have been highly unusual at any point in cinematic history. It’s now widely accepted that emotional complexities did indeed roil beneath the visually staid surfaces of so many of the French “cinema of quality” films of the forties and fifties derided by the Cahiers du cinéma critics who would become the transformative Nouvelle Vague auteurs; Olivia is a particularly extreme example of just how much irreconcilable sexual longing and psychological intensity can be crammed into the corners and crevices of an otherwise seemingly cosseted mise en scène.

Olivia is the newly restored revelation by filmmaker Jacqueline Audry, one of the very few female directors working in French cinema at the time, and she seems to be even less known today than she was then, which is to say not at all. In the thirties, Audry had started out as a script girl and as a directorial assistant to filmmakers such as Max Ophüls and Jean Dellanoy, and had begun directing her own films in the forties, including multiple Colette adaptations. Olivia, her fifth feature, is a work of bold, barely repressed sensuality, in which the simmering, unspoken, but ever-present love between women threatens to boil over into drama of Dido and Aeneas proportions.

Olivia fits snugly into the cinematic tradition of using a boarding school setting, with its potential for unsentimental education, as a breeding ground for tentative lesbian attraction—think of everything from Mädchen in Uniform to Diabolique to The Children’s Hour to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—but Audry’s film goes way beyond innuendo, while still stopping just shy of the full-on romance it desperately wants to be. The film is based on anonymously published, and autobiographically tinged 1950 English novel of the same name written by Dorothy Bussy, whose queer bona fides are rather remarkable: the bisexual Bussy’s younger brother was Lytton Strachey, renowned gay writer and critic; she was involved in an affair with renowned arts patron Lady Ottoline Morrell; and was friends with André Gide and E. M. Forster. The film version of Olivia allegedly tones down the more outward gay content of her book, but the overall atmosphere it maintains is quite extraordinary; it all but luxuriates in an always imminent queer lust.

Taking place at some point in the nineteenth century, Olivia begins in perfect novelistic form, as the title character is arriving to her new abode via carriage. She’s getting a little anticipatory lay of the land from the wise housekeeper and cook Victoire (Yvonne de Bray, the film’s Marjorie Main-esque secret weapon), who makes casual yet ominous reference to a “tragedy” but otherwise remains cheerful about Olivia’s arrival at the school. For her part, Olivia is wide-eyed, yet there’s something unsettlingly knowing in her visage; she has the face of someone who’s plotting something, but it also might just be wicked self-determination. Olivia comes with her own past connection to the school—her mother was a friend of the headmistress many years earlier.

When we first meet Miss Julie, her entrance is appropriately dramatic, emerging from the top of the foyer’s staircase landing, ensconced in lace. The grand dame is less imperious, however, than beseeching, a woman who appears to have as much love to impart as lessons to teach, and Feuillère, a veteran of screen and stage, who began in the Comédie-Française, plays her with an exquisite negotiation of delicacy and diamond-hard no-nonsense. If Miss Julie seems like a woman torn, there’s a very present reason for this: the school is home to another elegant yet brittle, more emotionally volatile mistress: Miss Cara, played by Cat People’s eternally feline Simone Simon. As the film progresses, we come to realize that Miss Julie and Miss Cara are engaged in something of a cold war, the origins of which remain ambiguous, but which captures the imagination, hearts, and souls of the student body. Victoire at one point says that the school is divided between the “Julists” and the “Carists.” Little does Olivia know that some of the girls have even already taken bets about which camp she will fall in.

On her first night, Olivia is already summoned to Miss Cara’s quarters; it’s “a great honor she does you,” insists Frau Riesener, Cara’s forbidding, Mrs. Danvers–like, German maid, whose hair is pulled tightly into a wreath that might as well be a coiled snake. Olivia asks her new confidante Mimi (Marina de Berg) if they will be reading passages from the Bible with this mysterious second mistress, a post-meal custom from her previous school, a place defined by a religious dread, where they were constantly warned about the trap of temptation. Mimi laughs off the thought; Miss Cara’s pleasures must be less traditionally devout. Upon entering her room, Olivia and Mimi find Miss Cara lounging exquisitely; trying to rest off her migraines and vapors, she asks the eager girls to do her bidding, replace her shawl, fluff her pillows, make her a hot cologne pad. Rather than a gothic Brontë-esque woman in the attic, Miss Cara is bitter and love-ravaged, and overly tended to by Frau Riesener, who won’t let her outside to walk around the school’s bucolic grounds, even after dinner, due to her mystery illness.

Yet Miss Cara is hardly the only character who seems to be under a spell. As inhabited by Marie-Claire Olivia—an actress who only appeared in two other movies and who reportedly legally changed her name to match her title character here, a strange piece of trivia that’s entirely in keeping with this film’s odd, free-floating sense of possession—the girl seems led by some unspoken internal desire. After an evening reading in which Miss Julie relates the story of Hermione, the other girls notice her ethereality, “walking as if in a dream.” Miss Cara appears to have tried to seduce Olivia away, but Olivia is enraptured by Miss Julie. What seems to start out as a schoolgirl crush becomes ever more intense. On a trip to Paris, the headmistress shows her Watteau’s “The Embarkation of Cytheria,” but Olivia can barely pull her eyes away from Miss Julie to even glance at the rococo landscape; on the train ride back, Miss Julie grows so unnerved by Olivia’s intense stares from across the compartment that she asks her to move next to her instead. Of course, Olivia then clutches at her hand instead.

The sort-of triangle that emerges amongst Olivia, Miss Julie, and Miss Cara comes to feel like an internal battle of wills with no possible victor. Cara loses the devotion of Olivia, who is desperate for the attention of Julie, who in turn is nursing long-untended wounds related to Cara; all of these loves seem both impossible and hugely consequential, a bursting-at-the-seams queer desire elevated to romantic agony. Audry sets this combustible craving within a labyrinthine interior space of vertiginous high angles; the school’s imposing staircases, window lattices, and marble patterned floors evoke a pressing claustrophobia. The film’s overwhelming expressivity reaches its apex during the school’s annual Christmas ball, in which the women dress up for one another in a kind of holiday pageant cum fashion show, which seems to allow them to let go of their inhibitions. At one point, Miss Julie grabs student Cecile, dressed up as “America,” and all but ravishes her, kissing her on the neck. Emboldened, she sidles up to Olivia, who’s wearing a teasing, gauzy sheik-like veil. Well aware of Olivia’s crippling crush, she nevertheless further plays with her, telling her she’ll come to her room tonight, and bring her “candy.” Later that night, we see Olivia lying in bed, waiting for Miss Julie’s arrival, in tears. She never comes.

Audry’s film is propelled by these kinds of casual cruelties and sexually ambiguous motivations. In this all-female world—men only appear very briefly as abstracted authority figures, often shot from behind—the characters’ erotic passions are somehow both proudly out in the open and necessarily sublimated. The film’s ghastly alternate U.S. title, The Pit of Loneliness, speaks to what a film about repressed female queer desire might have been in someone else’s hands. One can imagine a less sympathetic, male director, for instance, filming this as a story of miserable, doomed women. Instead, Olivia all but bursts with promise for the eventual fulfillment of lust, of the hope for emotional and spiritual and sensual and artistic connection.

Queer & Now & Then: 1951. By Michael Koresky. Film Comment , August 14, 2019.

Largely unavailable for decades, Jacqueline Audry’s 1951 Olivia has felt like a chimera to film historians, and particularly to scholars of queer film history, who have been teased over the years by scattered mentions of its depiction of lesbian desire. Now, thanks to Icarus Films and Distrib Films US, who have recently released Olivia in theaters and on disc, we discover that not only is the movie real, it is fascinating. When we encounter such older films for the first time, we tend to look and listen both as we imagine the film’s contemporary audience might have done and as our current selves, a phenomenon especially pronounced for queer audiences aware of the history of censorship. In the case of Olivia, however, the audacity of its queerness feels not only incredible for its moment but, as if by magic, for ours too. It arrives in a cultural context fascinated by depictions of occult imagery, as in The VVitch (Robert Eggers, 2015) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), and with casting those images in a queer light — with seeing the decision to give in to “the dark side” as ironically bright.

French film historian Carrie Tarr writes of Olivia: “As a film directed by a woman, based on a novel by a woman, adapted by a woman (Colette Audry, Jacqueline’s sister), featuring a virtually all-female cast and a narrative based on lesbian desire, Olivia is quite untypical of French cinema production of the 40s and 50s.” Indeed. The film is based on English writer Dorothy Bussy’s autobiographical novel — originally published anonymously due to its erotic lesbian content — from Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Colette Audry frequently collaborated with Simone de Beauvoir (Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe was published in 1949), and the person who brought Bussy’s book to Jacqueline Audry’s attention, after she had adapted two of her novels, was the mononymous famed writer and provocateur Colette.

Given this production history, it is unsurprising that from the beginning Olivia establishes concerns about identity, detection, gender, meaning, and the problem of rooting one’s self-identification — both in person and at the movies — in words and images whose meaning is determined by others. It opens with the titular character riding a rickety carriage chauffeured by saucy old Victoire, who informs her that her name “doesn’t mean much,” situating Olivia’s selfhood as a dilemma and perhaps suggesting that she (like the screen before us) is subject to others’ projections. Olivia arrives at her lush new boarding school, Les Avons, run by headmistresses Cara and elegant Julie, who are also a couple, and who exemplify the brunette/blonde pairing so endemic to mid-20th-century white lesbian imagery. Les Avons houses an assortment of faculty and students of various nationalities, including stern German teacher (and Cara’s Dom) Frau Riesener and ever-hungry math teacher Miss Dubois. Olivia quickly falls for Julie and avowedly declares her love. (Even when the dialogue resorts to euphemisms, as when Julie whispers to Olivia that she will visit her at night and “bring her candy,” the last thing one expects is for Julie to show up with candy.) Equally remarkable, Olivia suffers no resistance to her queer desires, no shame or guilt, no movement through the depths of self-ignorance. Problems arise as Cara and Olivia grow jealous over Julie’s many other conquests; significantly, Cara does not want Julie to herself but wants Julie to share the girls. On one hand, and without giving too much away, the ending punishes Julie and Olivia for their transgressions. But given the fact that the remainder of the faculty also sleep with each other and students, we might well suppose Les Avons’s practice of free love will continue after this story ends. What this world would not tolerate is a favorite, an individualist, in its midst. (Although I don’t want to comment on the self-evident impropriety of teacher-student relations, it is refreshing to visit a fictional realm in which lesbian desire circulates unchecked and relatively unfetishized.)

Beyond the story line, Audry’s style deepens Olivia’s queer sensibility. For example, after their initial meeting, Olivia watches Julie through an oval window frame, which is visually echoed in the bedroom mirror in which Olivia then studies her face.

This moment captures an experience arguably specific to young queers: of wanting the object of desire and also desiring, through some form of alchemical will, to become like that object. Such moments, too, suggest that Audry may have indeed been making her film for queer audiences, inviting them to reflect on their own attitudes toward the film’s frame and the visions of identity it contains.

Perhaps relevant to understanding Audry’s formal care is her experience as assistant director to G. W. Pabst and Max Ophüls. We might see all three artists as mutually influential; each are adept at expressive camera movements and creating dynamic tensions between artificial and realist moments. The flow of Audry’s camera highlights that, while some students may prefer Cara and others Julie, the group remains a collective. The carriage scenes that bookend Olivia’s arrival and departure from Les Avons are shot with obvious rear projection and static framing. Because no other scenes betray such obvious contrivance, the sumptuous world of the school — the fantastic idyll — feels all the more tangible. The theatrical non-space of the carriage scenes also make Olivia’s return to abstemious England less convincing, hollowing out the moralizing nature of the movie’s conclusion.

That the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, who played a fundamental role in shaping the Western film canon, ignored Audry is thus exceptionally egregious, since they celebrated directors like Alfred Hitchcock for precisely such stylistic display. Audry was instead classified as a director of literary costume dramas, a genre denigrated as “feminine” and the major target of François Truffaut’s polemical “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” (1954), which introduced the concept of auteurism as we know it today. As auteurism in Anglophone film criticism developed into a lens that excludes — among others — queer female directors, we might see Audry’s relative absence from film history as a point of origin for this bias. (This is not to say auteurism or consideration of a filmmaker’s expressivity itself is the problem. Global art cinema circulates through somewhat more inclusive auteurist lenses, for example.) Moreover, Truffaut’s central complaint — that “the tradition of quality” reinforced bourgeois values — hardly applies to Audry’s narratives, which often involve lesbian desire funneled through the scapegoat of adolescence (the old “calm down, it’s just a phase” routine). In fact, it makes better sense to position Hitchcock as indebted to Audry’s work (his historical fascination with lesbian iconography, conspicuous from Rebecca [1940] to The Birds [1963], and dating back to his reminiscences of Weimar-era Berlin bars, may be relevant, too). North by Northwest (1959), for example, blends realism and overt artifice to strikingly similar results, particularly in scenes of travel. There is even a conversation about the main character’s name being meaningless.

Olivia enjoyed modest international success upon release, though, according to Tarr, after being “panned by many of the (male) critics,” it was subsequently regarded as yet another narrative that reinscribes queer love as doomed. (The censored version released in the United States had the astonishing title The Pit of Loneliness.) Jump Cut’s 1981 “Filmography of Lesbian Works” erroneously described it as “[a] classic tear-jerker, based on Collette’s novel of the same name, and like Mädchen in Uniform, about girls and teachers in a boarding school.” The film’s few critical mentions also relate it to Mädchen, a 1931 German film about a student with a crush on an instructor. Richard Dyer, for example, briefly invokes Olivia’s style — “everything is based on the curve, the spiraling hall staircase, the silhouettes of the head teachers’ costumes, circling camera movements” — to underscore Mädchen’s “masculinity, discipline, rigidity.” More than merely contrasting with Mädchen’s style, we might see Olivia’s as a rejoinder to it, one rooted in its present while transmitted from the future — that is to say, our present.

In the context of 2019, Olivia transmogrifies into a response to cultural interest in witchcraft and the occult, and in seeing occult imagery as advancing (largely white) feminist and queer agendas and subverting heteropatriarchy. This is evident from widespread reports of witches joining together to cast a binding spell on Donald Trump to Netflix’s popular Chilling Adventures of Sabrina program, which features multiple queer story lines as well as a prominent trans character played by a non-binary actor. In cinematic circles, much attention has been given to “elevated horror” films such as The VVitch, Hereditary, and Midsommar. Each of these movies ends similarly: the young adult protagonist forgoes traditional middle-class white family life and takes their place in an occult community. Because of this supposed rejection of bourgeois normativity, many critics and fans have suggested that the depiction of occultism becomes a metaphor for queer difference. Such readings may be available, but Olivia suggests that they fall short, too.

Audry’s film flips the script by making queer desire manifest and occultism metaphorical. We sense this from the very beginning. An opening crawl reads, “Love has always been the chief business of my life. May the Gods grant me not to have profaned a rare and beautiful memory.” By signaling plural deities, the film distances itself from the monotheistic Christian god that dominated French and English thought in the 20th century. It also consistently conjures up images of the black arts. The perfume compress that the girls concoct to remedy Cara’s headache reads like a potion; Frau Riesener materializes from the shadows; Olivia falls for Julie after a ritualistic candle-lit reading. The text is Racine, but Julie’s delivery has the air of incantation, one that enchants Olivia, who walks away mesmerized “as if in a dream,” as one classmate says. When Olivia laments the conditions of her previous school, which was harsh and ascetic due to its orthodox Christian values, Julie replies, “Our lord is much less demanding.” How else are we to understand Julie’s reply if not to suppose that their lord — the indulgent, soft one — contrasts with the Christian one? Then there is Julie’s power to mysteriously heal the ill and, possibly, compel a mysterious death toward the film’s conclusion, through her purposeful recitation of a text about mortality. (There are practically no males in the picture, and even the faces of the male lawmakers investigating this death are barely seen.) The beautiful Les Avons, whose grounds seem to extend forever, is itself almost magical, a feminist enclave, a coven: food is lavish, and domestic labor is not kept below stairs but applauded. The astronomy lab and the enormous round table where Julie returns essays, and at which teacher sits amid students, seem more like spaces to learn sorcery than grammar. More importantly, while Cara and Julie are headmistresses, there is no authoritarian leader, no talk of rules and regulations, no cliques or bullies, no jealousy among the students.

The differences between this and more recent depictions of supernatural communities are striking. Unlike The VVitch, Hereditary, or Midsommar, Olivia’s journey to Les Avons is not presented as a move from one “family” to another. The recently made films allow that one may choose one’s family, but insist that one must have one, and one founded on deeply binaristically gendered divisions. (In Aster’s films, the occult worlds are also cults with clear leaders.) These stories present the occult worlds as scary, things to be resisted by their young adult heroes, implicitly reinforcing Christian hostilities to alternative spiritualties. The coven of The VVitch is obviously more appealing than the protagonist’s abusive puritanical family, but we are enjoined to feel suspense about her choice. The film does not feel the need to explain why she does not simply embrace the opportunity to “go live deliciously,” and so forces its audience to occupy conservative values in order to follow the narrative.

This is why Olivia feels so free, so fresh. It never places you in such an awful spot — a spot that the fans of the other films presumably take pleasure in. Olivia begins where The VVitch ends, as Olivia arrives to live deliciously, and her destination is beautiful, not scary. Olivia reminds us that betraying the status quo is only a struggle for those for whom it’s working, and in so doing, highlights how recent cinematic depictions, while purportedly espousing the subversiveness of occultism and the rejection of traditional values, do so only at their the ends, rendering them safe and ensuring that audiences need never confront the violence of those values or what abandoning them might look like. It also guarantees that the focus of the stories stays on the family or heterosexual couple. In this way, they offer an empty gesture of subversion. They give audiences a thrill without clash.

While a film as rich as Olivia may be read in many ways, and surely will be now, seeing the film in 2019 not only reshapes our picture of film history but also charms us by its departure from current popular cinematic depictions of cults and sorcery. The etymology of “cult” ties it to cultivation, reverence, the labor of care — all of which swirl around any scene of education. “Occult” has roots in keeping things secret and hidden. It is the perfect form for queer storytelling, and what better way to do that than to keep the occult-ness of it all itself hidden, subtextual? Audry’s Olivia is witchcraft as filmmaking.

Bewitched by “Olivia”. By Kyle Stevens. Los Angeles Review of Books,  September 12, 2019.

Films by Jacqueline Audry

In February 1948 André Gide received an uncharacteristically triumphant letter from his English translator. Used to hearing about Gide’s exploits, she now had, girlishly, ‘a little adventure of my own’ to confess. The manuscript of a short story which she had written and sent to Gide 19 years earlier – ‘Oh how could I be so idiotic?’ – and which Gide had stuffed in his desk drawer, had at last been shown to friends in London. Rosamond Lehmann had praised it; Leonard Woolf wanted to publish it. The story was Olivia; the author, anonymous on publication in 1949, was Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Lytton Strachey’s sister.

Olivia is a piece of spirited homage, by a woman both spirited and prone to homage. Dorothy Strachey had some of her brother’s susceptibility to surroundings and dedication to the animating power of personality: charged by Dorothy’s husband to begin a great work, Strachey felt himself too ‘obsédé par les personnages’ to comply. But while his energy and imagination turned to anatomising his distaste for other people’s admirations, hers were devoted to the creation of new heroes. He was all Apostle; she all acolyte. Gide was one of these heroes; Olivia celebrates another. Brief and fervent, it tells of a year spent by a 16-year-old girl in a French school: a year in which the narrator develops a passionate attachment to one of the headmistresses. Her account has little of the traditional school-story about it: no pranks, no prefects, no smell of ink; the tone is confessional; the subject is first love. It is not difficult to see why Dorothy Strachey chose to publish anonymously. Events have been dramatised, but the main features of the story are autobiographical: the school was one she attended; the headmistress a woman she knew and admired; the home she leaves is recognisably that of the Strachey household.

Dorothy Strachey dedicated Olivia to ‘the beloved memory of V.W.’ – who twenty years earlier had published a study of ambiguous sexuality with an oddly echoing title. But the book has another, more oblique dedication: one which makes it a defiant declaration against her family as well as a hymn of praise to a particular woman. Olivia was the name of a Strachey sister who had died in infancy and who had prompted some peculiar lines from Lytton Strachey when he was nine:

To me Life is a burden

  But to thee        

The joyous pleasures of the world

  Are all a gaiety.               

But if thou did’st perceive my thoughts

Then thou would’st sigh and mourn,

  Olivia, like me.                 

Transfixed by what that sister had missed, Strachey examined his childhood home, Lancaster Gate, with a forensic fascination: finding dirt, clutter, ‘foggy distances’ and ‘brains crouched behind the piano’, he went on to diagnose an age characterised by an absence of nerves and a nation distinguished by its addiction to antimacassars, rhubarb and self-righteousness. Dorothy Strachey appears in his early diaries and autobiographical essays as an effusive elder sister: ‘Dorothy ... kissed me a hundred times, in a rapture of laughter and affection, counting her kisses, when I was six’; as a stiff little figure in white muslin and a black sash, in mourning for the German Emperor; as an efficient chaperon, bustling her small seasick brother up into bracing deck air. Her own description of Lancaster Gate in Olivia has the same critical tendency as her brother’s, but is less quizzical, more personal, directed with some vehemence against a mother who was unaware of her children’s preoccupations and – what is made to seem even more important – who chose food, clothes and furnishings ‘not without care but without taste’. Lady Strachey’s principled charmlessness seems to have extended to her way with words: Dorothy Strachey remembers a romance-shrivelling reading of Tom Jones and a lot of good talk which left the children edgy and bored. In recalling the infrequent interventions of her father, who ‘would let fall from time to time a grim and gnomic apophthegm, which we treasured as a household word’, she mirrors one of the more poignant of her brother’s diary entries: ‘In the evening we played on combs and Papa came.’

Though Dorothy and Lytton Strachey hung around their home long after adolescence, their writings were to celebrate sensibility rather than argument, character rather than topic. His archness and her earnestness had a similar syntax and vocabulary: both luxuriated in surprise; both on occasion wrote as if surprise were a sufficient condition for interest. Strachey’s delicious thrills of disgust (‘filthy little brackets – disgusting grasses – appalling vases!’ he was exclaiming at the age of 12) are only a shiver away from his sister’s raptures: ‘Ravishing, ravishing creatures!’ Both were encouraged in spryness, and in a scamper after the exquisite, by the woman who dominates Olivia – the woman Strachey called ‘cette grande femme’.

Marie Souvestre was a stylish and sceptical French schoolteacher, headmistress first of a school near Fontainebleau which Dorothy and her sister Elinor attended; later of a school in London where Dorothy taught. She was pro-Boer, anti-public school and eagerly atheistic; artistic, witty and given to intimacies. Her zeal, charm, and no doubt her connections, which ranged from Rodin to Mrs Humphry Ward, put the eminent on their mettle. Henry James thought her school at ‘high, breezy Wimbledon’ held ‘a very particular place ... The one shade of objection is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in defining the area in which humility was appropriate, complained that her ‘absence of humility ... narrowed her influence to those whom she happened to like and who happened to like her’. She had a point: there was something of the Jean Brodie about Marie Souvestre. Her schools were a long way from the world of purple knees and navy-blue knickers; she had favourites among her students – Eleanor Roosevelt, Beatrice Chamberlain, Dorothy Strachey – and these favourites were presented with a library full of flowers and paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, with select readings in the headmistress’s study and debate with professors at meals. The enthusiastic drilling of girlish sensibilities had some of the characteristics of a religious order – Marie Souvestre’s girls were encouraged to lie down for an hour after lunch and consider a single thought to be discussed, in French, at tea – but the goal was cultural rather than supranatural elevation. Eleanor Roosevelt’s schooling included a trip to Florence (where the pupil procured the hansoms and porters, the headmistress chose the desirable sights), the discouragement of nail-biting, and the sympathetic instruction that there were ‘more quiet and enviable joys’ than success at balls. Her notebooks show her neatly tabulating the merits of Richardson’s novels, diligently rapturous at the Comédie Française. She was commended by Marie Souvestre for ‘a fineness of feeling truly exquisite’.

Dorothy Strachey also applied herself to the pursuit of fine feeling, and in Olivia produced a book which is written in a continual tremor of excitement. It is a novel of meltings, glowings, softenings and glooms, which declares its delicacies boldly, and announces the author’s adherence to spontaneity and romance with some question-begging flourishes: ‘How can one ... write without laying bare one’s soul?’ Freud is called a poisoner of passion and made less dispiriting: ‘waiting and watching for the prowling beasts, the nocturnal vermin, to come creeping out of their lairs, to recognise this one and that, to give it its name’. Love is pronounced ‘too horrible to speak of ... and too delicious’ – and is the main subject of conversation.

Arriving at her school in France, Olivia enters a world which is entirely female and in many respects a feminist’s nightmare: a world busy with languishing and devoted tending, where competitiveness thrives but only the villainess has a clear ambition. The girls are divided into two camps, each pledging allegiance to one of the headmistresses, Mlle Cara and Mlle Julie (Marie Souvestre). Their long friendship is disintegrating, apparently through the machinations of an empire-building teacher, though the suspicion grows in the novel, if not in the narrator’s mind, that friendships so ambiguously sexual and so rarified are interestingly doomed. The school may be full of fragrant consolations – of sofas and eau-de-Cologne and dampened handkerchiefs, of sympathies exchanged in small rooms but – it is not free from the shades of Radclyffe Hall, or Mrs Radcliffe: there are ‘sulphurous fumes’ and ‘exhalations from some obscure depths’ and, at the end, an ill-explained death. There are tantrums and teasings, fret and flurry. Senior girls line the corridor as Mlle Julie leaves for Parisian parties – like a mother in a novel doomed to die young – with her cloak thrown back to show ‘the shimmer of bare neck and lace and satin’; small girls dismissed abruptly from Mlle Cara’s classes emerge furrowed, muttering: ‘The migraine!’ The trouble-making mistress is significantly isolated in this company by her marital status and by teaching a non-Romance language: ‘ “And just think!” said someone else, “the German mistress is a widow!” ’

The short scenes which make up Olivia are elegantly tailored to produce a sense of hectic dazzling. Olivia is wooed by Cara with chocolates, but won by the more exigent Julie, who reads her Racine, takes her to art galleries and the homes of Academicians, and occasionally presses her hand. And once won she is rapt: in the contemplation of her heroine’s virtues and connections, in the extensive elaboration of her own feelings and, more briefly, in the covert examination of her own ‘joli corps’. No one in Olivia, least of all the narrator, would support the view expressed by Lytton Strachey’s imaginary adolescent Ermyntrude that ‘being in love is merely a more polite way of saying that your pussy’s pouting.’ Yet, though sex is never mentioned, eroticism is on every page. It is present in the appearance of Olivia’s fellow students, who, more maidenly than the average batch of 16-year-olds, appear at a Fancy Dress Ball provocatively equipped with plunging necklines or decked out in top hat and whiskers. It is present in the language of Olivia’s ‘indefinite desire’, which has her aching, awakening and dissolving; it is present in Mlle Julie’s promise that, St Agnes-like, she will come to Olivia’s bedside and ‘bring you a sweet’.

The lure of this enclosed and fragile community is persuasively sketched; the large claims made for it are less convincing. The smallest murmur from Mlle Julie sets Olivia rhapsodising in a battery of imprecations, exclamations and rhetorical questions. Thrilling to the affirmative possibilities of the normally dull, she discovers transfiguring potential in her Latin grammar: the Comédie Française can hardly measure up to this – it offers, like a Dior garment, ‘the delicious satisfaction of perfect finish!’ The unfocused and disproportionate quality of Olivia’s passion may he part of the point, but Mlle Julie is in danger of disappearing under her admirer’s adulation: she is praised for epigrams and ironies which are unrecorded; credited with unproven nobility and unprovable charisma. And not all the language of this ecstasy is fresh. Paeans sing readily in hearts; frames turn quickly to water; creamy shoulders evoke the same inexplicably immediate throb achieved in heterosexual romances when sunlight glints on a man’s hairy wrist.

Dorothy Strachey was not incapable of astringency. Her early experience of a Wesleyan school – where, having vowed to resist the faith, she was condemned to climb to bed conspicuously prayerless – is charted in Olivia with acerbic economy. But when she admired she adored. Her adoration had little to do with self-sacrifice: she sought attention from her heroes and paid attention to her own feelings. In Olivia the narrator compares her own emotional imperiousness with the less demanding attitude of two other admirers of Mlle Julie. The tiny Italian mistress, Mlle Baietto, perches beside Julie on a stool as she reads, and ends up contentedly trimming her idol’s nails in Canada. Laura, an old favourite of Julie’s, returns to the school for a visit: she is candid and clumsy and intelligent; saintly but engaging, she amazes Olivia by managing to love Julie but retain her composure.

Both these figures, more substantial than Olivia’s graceful contemporaries, are clearly based on people Dorothy Strachey knew. Mlle Baietto is a close portrait of Mlle Samaia, Marie Souvestre’s small and constant companion, who taught at both her schools – and monitored the state of Eleanor Roosevelt’s fingernails. Laura is more enigmatic. Writing last year in Feminist Studies, Blanche Wiesen Cook explained that Laura is a ‘barely disguised’ picture of Eleanor Roosevelt: a plausible notion, given Eleanor Roosevelt’s success – both social and academic – at the Wimbledon school and the praise she attracted from Marie Souvestre for the ‘perfect quality of her soul’. But it is at least as likely that Laura, who is described in Olivia as being the daughter of ‘perhaps the most important man in England at the time’, was Beatrice, the eldest daughter of Joseph Chamberlain and half-sister of Neville. Beatrice Chamberlain was a friend of the Strachey family: one of Lytton’s earliest memories was of her ‘playing at having tea with me, with leaves and acorns, under a tree.’ She was older than Dorothy Strachey, as Laura is older than Olivia, and attended Marie Souvestre’s school in France – not the later Wimbledon version (where Eleanor Roosevelt was taught by Dorothy Strachey). Like Laura, who is praised in Olivia for her generosity in welcoming the authority of a new step-mother, Beatrice Chamberlain had coped with her father’s household between his marriages. And Dorothy Strachey’s Italian literary tendencies might well have inclined her to imagine that Dante’s Beatrice could be replaced by Petrarch’s Laura.

Blanche Wiesen Cook’s main theme is the ‘historical denial of lesbianism’. She sees Olivia as a contribution to candour in this area, which it is, but is hasty in representing the novel as a geriatric coming-out: ‘at 83, Dorothy Strachey Bussy fell ... the need to assail and stand up to those elements of her culture that had caused her to hide.’ Olivia may proclaim the ‘urgency of confession’, but the novel wasn’t exactly a final utterance. Gide’s desk had housed a manuscript of Olivia (along with a Noh play and other offerings from Dorothy Strachey) some fifteen years before the book was published – and Dorothy Strachey was nowhere near signing off in her sixties. Olivia was not her last word on love, and when she wrote about ‘a deep-rooted instinct, which all my life has kept me from any form of unveiling’, she was not merely making a coy reference to her sex life. The same instinct had, until then, kept her from ‘all literary expression’. It seems reasonable to suppose that this instinct had its origin in unsexy Lancaster Gate, whose public-spiritedness could make almost any expression of personal preference seem an indecent act.

Lytton Strachey may have delighted in shrilling his apostasy: his sister seems to have rebelled only when an alternative object for homage presented itself. She loved where it was difficult or dangerous to love, where her capacity for admiration could be excited by unattainability. Her marriage, at nearly forty, to the painter Simon Bussy was described by her brother as an act of ‘extraordinary courage’ which shook the Strachey household. Lady Strachey (who might perhaps have preferred the suitor who later became Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue) thought that the ‘terrible feature’ of the marriage was ‘the smallness of means’; her son, more idiosyncratically, complained of the Bussys’ affectionateness: ‘Couples in the road with their silly arms round their stupid waists irritate me in the same way.’

The charm and conviviality of the Bussys’ house in the South of France – where, Strachey wrote, ‘the pink of beauty reigns’ – no doubt fulfilled some of the expectations of exquisiteness aroused by Marie Souvestre and her school system. But there was still room for a hero, Dorothy Bussy met André Gide in 1918; she was 52 and he was 49. She helped to teach him English in Cambridge, became his main English translator, and conducted a correspondence with him which lasted until Gide’s death thirty years later. Some of these letters, edited (and in Gide’s case translated) by Richard Tedeschi, appeared in a recent edition of Salmagundi. Dorothy Strachey’s letters are strikingly similar to Olivia in language and attitudes: they show someone working, often on rather exiguous materials, to create a hero and, in doing so, a place for herself.

Gide valued her and the work she did for him. She was obsessed by him. She wrote to him about ‘the radiance of your presence’ and ‘your essential beauty’. In 1920, 12 years before she began to describe the ‘extraordinary nobility’ of Mlle Julie’s ‘austere’ face, thinking ‘she must have suffered ...,’ she was writing to Gide: ‘The things that make a face beautiful to me are the things that are pre-eminent in yours – thought and suffering and experience – knowledge of good and evil. Oh! How I like to look at your forehead and wonder and wonder what is working behind it, and your eyes which are so eager and so rarely tender, and your lips, your lips, sweet, austere, incredibly mysterious.’ Meanwhile Gide kept her up-to-date on his chills, his ‘terrible accumulation of work’, his fatigue and the demands on his time: ‘friends who claim attention, ask advice.’ She teased him as if they were lovers, redirecting a letter from Ottoline Morrell inside an envelope addressed in her own handwriting, hoping that he would be disappointed. Gide responded to all this with some tenderness and concern – anxious if he didn’t hear from her, and anxious that she shouldn’t worry about him – and with considerable astonishment: ‘your heart has resources that amaze me. I read you with a sort of dumb admiration: What! all this is written to me!’

There was some wiliness as well as self-satisfaction in his reactions: he managed to avoid saying that his feelings equalled hers, but insinuated that any discrepancy was due only to her greater emotional capacity, his shortcomings. This line seems to have suited Dorothy Strachey quite well. She constantly avowed her sense of his intellectual superiority – ‘Vous pouvez me comprendre mais moi – vous. Never. What a reversal of axioms it would be’ – and to some extent played the part of the supportive woman, always there, therefore always needed: ‘the infinite patience and conscientiousness and fidelity that is necessary in a translator is more often found among women. And moreover a man who is more gifted than a woman is less likely to devote himself to the subordinate task of translating.’

By presenting herself as an interpreter rather than an originator, she was able to hint at unexplored qualities and reserves of instinctive judgment: ‘But though I can’t understand, I can see beauty.’ She commented freely, though far from disinterestedly, on Gide’s life – as if it were a work she were translating. His announcement that he was the father of Elisabeth Van Rysselberghe’s child was greeted with a torrent of anguish: ’Do I hate her? Not really. I hope. I think not really. But it made me physically sick to look at her.’ She can hardly have expected to win Gide as a lover with these words; nor are they the phrases of a reliable chum – they are, rather, those of a woman determined to treat a major event in her correspondent’s life as an unpleasant episode disrupting the course of a steadier sentimental friendship. When Gide, who looked upon his insensitivities as acts of integrity, published his 1928 Journal, which contained a cool reference to her infatuation, Dorothy Strachey overlooked the self-righteous Empire talk in which he phrased the reference: ‘the fear of causing pain is a form of cowardice which my whole being rebels against.’ She howled – partly out of embarrassment, but partly because she was convinced that his diary was less true than her letters: ‘You and I know that it is not true.’

In the end, she may have brought Gide round. The man who in brushing aside Olivia had dismissed what may have been intended as a concealed love letter to him, and who had written with gratuitous candour, ‘the time will come, and soon – when your friendship can be a great support,’ grew more sentimental as he grew old. In the safety of his eighties, he was signing his letters: ‘With all my very tired heart, I love you.’

Who is Laura? By  Susannah Clapp. London Review of Books,  December 1981. 

For most of my life, I was profoundly skeptical about the enterprise of amassing rare books.

What was the use, I thought, of hoarding fragile, papery materials that could easily be ruined

with one casual slosh of a coffee cup? This prejudice against delicate things sprang quite

naturally, I suppose, from my parents’ insistence that any Old Items they acquire be sturdy, if

not useful. In a typical gesture towards the permanent, my father had his favorite purchase, a

stone sculpture of the Hindu elephant-god Ganesha, bricked into our garden wall, where its

stoic endurance of Connecticut winters gives silent testament to its durability.

 I held on to this familial scorn for the ephemeral until my fondness for books—and

for one book in particular—pushed me into the vast and addictive world of ‘rare books,’ a

world in which I am still a fresh, though eager, initiate. I’ve always been fond of my books,

particularly my almost-complete works of Roald Dahl. But only recently have I cared about

dust-jackets and foxing, about carefully ferrying around my tiny collection, double-wrapped

in plastic bags and zipped into an unsightly waterproof knapsack. This ‘collection’

(admittedly limited by my undergraduate budget) comprises eight editions of the same novel

– Olivia by Dorothy Strachey (1865-1960).

Whatever fame Strachey has derives largely from her association with other, more

luminous stars—she was the sister of Lytton Strachey, wife of painter Simon Bussy, part of

the Bloomsbury group, and the primary translator of French writer André Gide, with whom

she carried on a semi-romantic friendship and a voluble correspondence. In 1933, Strachey

dashed off Olivia in French and sent the manuscript to Gide, who dismissed the book as

being too fanciful. After fifteen years, Strachey revisited Olivia, translated it into English,

and—with encouragement from friends, novelist Rosamond Lehmann among them—

submitted it to Leonard Woolf. At Strachey’s gentle urging, Gide re-read the novel and

completely revised his earlier opinion: “You musn’t hide this little masterpiece under a

bushel,” he wrote. With Gide’s blessing and Woolf’s enthusiastic endorsement, the book was

published by the Hogarth Press in 1949 as Olivia by Olivia.

 Despite excellent critical reception, Strachey was eager to mask her authorial identity.

“P.S. my book is to be anonymous,” she wrote to Gide, “and please don’t mention it to any one –

though I have told Roger.” But within months of publication, several journalists had outed

Strachey, though some speculated that ‘Olivia’ was either Roger Martin du Gard, who had

re-translated the novel into French, or Gide himself. (The dust-jacket on the first Dutch

edition affirms that Gide didn’t write Olivia and that “The author wished to remain

incognito, and it does not matter who it is.”) Strachey’s insistence on anonymity undoubtedly

stemmed from concerns about the book’s lesbian content. Like much contemporaneous gay

writing, Olivia avoids explicit vocabulary (words like ‘lesbian,’ ‘queer,’ or ‘homosexual’ never

appear), but its Sapphic nature is unmistakable—so unmistakable that Olivia appeared in the

Catholic index of banned books. And it was precisely because of this Sapphism that my

attention was directed to the novel. I first read Olivia while researching for my thesis in the

English Department (the thesis is on gay coming-of-age literature in early-to-mid 20th-century Britain—admittedly a niche). And I was astonished to find that, unlike so much of what I was reading, Olivia was artfully subtle, emotionally accurate, and beautifully written.

A semi-autobiographical work, Olivia was based on Strachey’s education at Les Ruches, an all-girls boarding school in Fontainebleau run by Marie Souvestre. Narrated by the grown-up Olivia, the novel describes the 16-year-old Olivia’s intense love for an enigmatic teacher, Mademoiselle Julie. After the mysterious death of her lover, Mlle Cara, Julie attempts suicide. The novel is refreshingly devoid of any lesbian self-hatred on Olivia’s part; she regards her love for Julie as something ‘amazing’ and ‘innocent.’ But we also learn that adult-Olivia’s urge to describe her experiences has long been thwarted by ‘a deep-rooted instinct, which all my life has kept me from any form of unveiling, which has forbidden me many of the purest physical pleasures and all literary expression.’

I began searching for editions of Olivia (Strachey’s only novel) in hopes of discovering how and when Strachey became directly associated with the book. Though the 1975 Spanish edition, the 1981 Hogarth, and the Triangle edition all credit Strachey on the lower cover or inside the dust-jacket, ‘Olivia’ is the name emblazoned on the upper cover, suggesting that readers were more likely to recognize Olivia by Olivia, without Strachey’s name attached. In a nod to this dilemma, the Cleis edition credits ‘Dorothy Strachey (Writing as Olivia).’ But even Strachey’s name is something of a complication—Triangle calls her ‘Strachey Bussy,’ and she’s billed as ‘Bussy’ in her published correspondence with Gide.

The issue of cover art is fascinating, too; the first-edition dust-jacket sports a Parisian sketch by Duncan Grant on both covers, as though intentionally leaving no space for informative blurbs. Last year’s Vintage cover alludes to the novel’s homosexual themes with its quaint graphic of two adjoining pairs of ladies’ boots. But the eerie Editorial Lumen cover is my favorite: In a tinted photograph, two schoolgirls in white hats bend their heads together while a crouching girl stares morosely into the lens—as though to emphasize the child’s difference, she remains in un-tinted black and white.

Though I hope someday to collect Colette, Isherwood, Djuna Barnes, and other favorites, Olivia is my current preoccupation—I’m now hunting for a copy of du Gard’s translation with Lehmann’s introduction, a 1960s edition with a wonderful pulp-y cover, and a copy of the Virago edition, which I believe was the first to credit Strachey. This collecting feeds my curiosity about anonymity, about the judgments offered by forewords, about publishers’ attention to Sapphic themes, about clues provided by cover-art. But my interest in Strachey is also, admittedly, a sentimental one.

Having grappled with my own, far more minor issues of anonymity, I find myself feeling wistful about the personal and literary closeting that Strachey underwent—if circumstances had been different, might she have written more prolifically or more candidly? I feel wistful, too, about the novel’s undeserved consignment to the obscure periphery of ‘the canon.’ Despite my resolution not to care about papery things, I can’t help but feel a tugging sense of obligation towards these books—an obligation to find them and keep them and write about  what I’ve found and kept, to preserve and give witness to the complex history of a novel that, to me, has meant a great deal.

Finding and Keeping Olivia. By Ruth McCann,  Stanford University,  2009.

Also of interest : 

Olivia from Bloomsbury to NRF.  By Marie-Claire Hamard. 1996. RACO