In her will Una appointed Horatio Lovat Dickson, a director of the Macmillan publishing house, as her literary executor. He wrote a biography of Radclyffe Hall in 1975 then gave the research papers he had inherited to the Canadian National Archive, Ottawa. These include more of Una’s diaries, her other writings, Radclyffe Hall’s personal and business letters and much relating to the English trial of The Well of Loneliness. The executorship has passed to Horatio Lovat Dickson’s son Jonathan. I am grateful to him and to his agent A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd. for their help and for permission to quote from copyright material.
Cara Lancaster, great-granddaughter of Mabel Batten, Radclyffe Hall’s first love, has inherited her diaries, letters and papers. She kindly let me study these and use quotation from them.
My thanks to Joan Slater and Monica Still. They have amassed an impressive archive over the past decade. Their knowledge of the life and works of Radclyffe Hall is huge. They organised a memorial fund to restore and maintain her catacomb vault at Highgate Cemetery. She now has an oak coffin, and candles light her private altar. Joan has written an as yet unpublished biography of her. She generously let me make use of her research papers.
In the long haul of writing I have depended on the encouragement and editorial inspiration of Rebecca Wilson, publishing director at Weidenfeld. My thanks to her and to my agent Georgina Capel for her support, advice and flair.
All thanks too to my friend Naomi Narod. She always expects my books to be bestsellers and casts them for stage and screen with in my view remarkable perspicacity.
MARGUERITE
1
The Fifth Commandment
On a summer day in 1884 a blue-eyed four-year-old with ash blonde hair walked with her English nurse in the old cemetery in West Philadelphia near her grandmother’s house. It was quiet there, the day was clear, she could smell boxwood, pine and new-mown grass. She walked on a gravel path littered with tiny shells, which she stopped to collect. There were high trees to her right, an avenue ahead and, to her left, bare grass, mounds of earth and new graves.
A small group wearing black came towards her across the grass. A woman among them, tall with a long veil and gloves, seemed to stare at her. Two of the men carried between them a white wooden box. The group stopped by a freshly dug hole beside which was a mound of earth. They lowered the box into the hole and a man began shovelling in earth. At the sound of the earth hitting the box, the woman jerked back. The movement made the girl think of her mechanical bear on its green baize stand at home in London. The woman bent over the hole in the ground then raised her face and screamed. She seemed to scream at the sky, the trees, the man shovelling earth and the little girl out with her nurse.
Consolation for such ontological terrors was not on offer to Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall from her mother whom she feared and despised: ‘Always my mother. Violent and brainless. A fool but a terribly crafty and cruel fool for whom life had early become a distorting mirror in which she saw only her own reflection.’
In two unpublished autobiographical pieces, Forebears and Infancy and Michael West, in letters and in fictional allusion in her novels, she defined her mother as grasping, violent and capricious. ‘I cannot,’ she said, ‘keep the fifth commandment.’ Home for a child, she averred, should be a refuge, a place of affection and kindness. Hers was ‘bereft of security’ and haunted by the feeling that something was wrong. ‘I pity those whose memories of home have been rendered intolerable as have mine. They and I have lost a great sweetness in life.’
The mother of her fantasy was religious and peaceful. ‘A woman one would long to protect while coming to in turn for protection.’ The mother she had, Mary Jane Hall, ‘late Sager formerly Diehl’, was attracted and attractive to rakish men and had startling mood swings. She gave birth on 12 August 1880 to a daughter she had tried to abort, whom she never liked and to whom the acutest insult she could fling was, ‘You are like your father.’ Not an ounce of the child’s blood, she said, came from her. The girl was Radclyffe through and through. Her hands, nose, temper and perversity were the curse of the father, the devil incarnate.
This birth took place in England in a house called Sunny Lawn at Westcliff, Bournemouth. ‘Sunny Lawn’ God Help Us, Radclyffe Hall wrote:
A night of physical passion and then me, born solely of bodily desire, of animal impulse and nothing more. For I cannot believe those parents of mine could ever have known the love of the spirit. Nor did I bring peace into that distracted home by drawing their warring natures together. Quite the contrary. At the time of my birth a deadly quarrel was raging.
She learned of this quarrel from her mother. Her parents parted for ever a month after her birth. Her father, Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, known familiarly as Rat, the man whom she so resembled, whose blood alone flowed in her veins, was, so she heard, a degenerate who beat and abused his wife, chased her round the house with a pistol, had sex with the servants and threw a joint of cold lamb at the cook.
Mary Jane Sager met him in Southport, Lancashire in 1878. She was travelling with his cousin, James Reade, who had settled in New Orleans when he married her aunt. He had gone to America from Congleton, Cheshire, where his family owned silk mills. He was in Southport visiting family and recovering from a back
