“The Outcast of One Age Is the Hero of Another”:
Radclyffe Hall, Edward Carpenter and the
Intermediate Sex
On July 19, 1928, Radclyffe Hall wrote to Havelock Ellis concerning his brief statement on The Well of Loneliness: “I was so overjoyed and proud at winning your good opinion for my book that I should have liked to walk up and down Piccadilly with it on a sandwich board….[There is] nothing I prize so highly or consider so vitally important for my book as your friendship and approval.” 1 Why would a successful novelist—the only Englishwoman to win two of the most prestigious literary prizes in a single year—invest so much capital in the approval of a man famed more for his knowledge of human sexuality than for his literary expertise? 2 If Hall was the avid student of Ellis's theories on sexual inversion some critics claim, perhaps his endorsement of her study of female inverts represented yet another “prize” for a job well done. Alternatively, such a gushing tribute to the “greatest living authority on the tragical problem of sexual inversion” might be read as the response of a dutiful daughter toward a powerful father figure. 3 A more cynical reading of Hall's overreaction would be to suggest that, savvy in the ways of publicity, she fully appreciated how Ellis's willingness to provide a statement constituted a significant coup. The great sexologist's name conjoined with her new novel—often characterized by critics of The Well as virtually a fictional version of his theories—might pay handsome dividends in the literary market
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