Reviews for Noël Coward & Radclyffe Hall

The average rating for Noël Coward & Radclyffe Hall based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-25 00:00:00 Elizabeth Jochman What a book! 'The connection between Hall and Coward has not been examined; biographers mention their friendship, if at all, only in passing. Somehow one is not surprised: exploring the link between them confounds the symbolic opposition that seems so powerfully to divide male and female homosexuals in the popular imagination. ... Yet the history of homosexual creativity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is full of vibrant cross-gender relationships. What one might call emotional bisexuality – often involving some sort of creative "marriage" or symbolic siblinghood with a homosexual person of the opposite sex -- has been a central part of gay and lesbian experience.' The whole book felt like a glorious, much-needed breath of fresh air, but this in particular really touched me. It’s always pleasant – especially, I think, as an LGBTQ+ person – to see your own experiences on a page in front of you, and though this kind of creative cross-gender connection that Castle describes so well has been a big part of my life, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it mentioned before. In a similar vein, it’s great to see the ‘male’ and ‘female’ cultures being recombined. I’m glad to see that they were so combined – it’s always seemed that way to me, from the salons of the turn of the century to the Bright Young Things and the Bloomsbury Group and so forth – and it’s always appealed. I think there is often a certain dullness to ‘lesbian culture’ compared to its male equivalent, although I’ve never been able to decide if it’s due to a sort of Room of One’s Own effect not allowing much to be produced, even covertly, or if what has been produced has just been lost to time. I almost wonder if there’s something in the fact that men have had all the classical culture as a starting point – be it mythology, or Plato, or even just the scattered relevant poems of Virgil etc. – whereas women, as ever, have had to scrounge around for even slimmer pickings. (And even then people have managed to cast Sappho as jumping off a cliff for love of a man.) It’s certainly hard not to feel more engaged in the culture of Homer and Ovid and Plato and Michelangelo and Shakespeare etc. etc. compared to – what? – Sappho and Marie Antoinette? A dash of Naomi and Ruth if you’re feeling desperate? But seeing it as a sort of shared heritage broadens the scope, even if there is the patriarchal element. Anyway. Excellent food for thought and a genuinely liberating read.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-26 00:00:00 William Albert The author's conclusions are interesting, although a bit of a stretch.