Radclyffe Hall’s name echoes through any history of early 20th century women’s writing, or queer writing. We all know that The Well of Loneliness was banned for its portrayal of a lesbian relationship (in the so so saucy words ‘that night they were not parted’) – but what is Hall actually like as a writer? While I’ve read some of her short stories, A Saturday Life is my first novel by Hall. And, wow, it is so much freer and funnier than I was expecting.
I’d sort of assumed Hall would be worthy and earnest, and the more I read the less time I have for earnestness in fiction. In A Saturday Life, though, she is neither of those things. And we might be able to grasp that from an opening scene, where young Sidonia is experimenting in naked dancing, and her absent-minded mother is called upon to look away from Egyptian research and do some parenting.
Sidonia is an extremely gifted child, given to whole-hearted creative expression – for a time. Over the course of the novel, she embraces dance, singing, the piano and sculpture with wild enthusiasm that fades almost as soon as the commitment to pursue them has been made. The slightly odd title is only explained when the novel is well past the halfway mark: a ‘Saturday life’ relates to ‘an Eastern tradition’, which suggests certain spirits have seven incarnations on earth – and, in the final stage, someone is ‘said to exhibit remarkable talent for a number of different things; but since they have many memories to revive, they can never concentrate for long on one’. I have no idea if such a theory exists, but it does feel rather like Hall read about it and wondered what a character like that would be in reality, in an upper-middle-class home, and what their impact might be on the people around them.
In the very good introduction to my Virago Modern Classics edition, Alison Hennegan describes Sidonia as ‘wilful, enchanting, exasperating and ultimately ambiguous’, and I think that is an excellent way of putting it. As a person, she is all those things – but as a character to read about, she is chiefly (at least at first) very funny to read about. I didn’t expect Hall to be so dry and funny, with such a deadpan tone. We see how ridiculous Sidonia can be, without losing the simultaneous sense of how tricky her life might be to live. And a lot of the humour comes from the ways in which her mother, Lady Shore, struggles to really pay attention to Sidonia’s development – even while caring. Here’s a conversation she has with Frances, an unmarried friend who is a go-between for mother and daughter, a confidante for both, and a source of reason and sense that both need and both often disregard.
A year slipped by, and another year. Lady Shore began a new book.
‘It’s so peaceful, I think I could work again.’
‘Sidonia’s seventeen,’ said Frances.
Lady Shore looked puzzled.
‘So she is, my dear. I shall write my hand-book on scarabs.’
‘Some people would think Sidonia quite lovely.’
‘Yes, of course. Have you seen my spectacles?’
‘Here they are. We don’t know many men, do we, Prudence?’
Lady Shore was trying hard to breathe a scratch off her glasses. ‘There’s Professor Wilson,’ she murmured abstractedly.
‘I said men, not ichthyosauri,’ snapped Frances.
‘But why do we want to know men, my dear?’
‘There’s safety in numbers,’ Frances remarked thoughtfully; ‘the thing to be dreaded and feared is one man. One man is usually the wrong one.’
Lady Shore put down her glasses.
‘Oh, dear!’ she complained, ‘I know, you want to discuss something tiresome.’
‘Sidonia’s seventeen,’ repeated Frances stubbornly. ‘Sidonia’s no longer a child.’
Lady Shore looked frightened.
The actual man arrives on the scene rather later, after Sidonia has had an ill-fated beginning to some sort of scholarship to sculp elsewhere. The man she meets wouldn’t be out of place in a made-for-Netflix romantic comedy:
He was tall, quite six-foot-two, thought Sidonia, and his shoulders were flat and broad. His waist and flanks were excessively slim, his close-cropped hair waved a little. His eyes were grey, not intelligent, but kind, his features blunt and regular. His clean-shaven face would have looked well in bronze. He had a deep cleft in his chin.
Ok, yes, it does feel rather like a queer writer being all, “Idk what makes men hot; I guess I’ll describe a statue” but with added flanks, which I have only encountered elsewhere in horses. But maybe she is making a point? Anyway, David (!!) is cut from the kind-but-stupid mould, and increasingly wants Sidonia to conform to his outlook on life. And she is pretty willing to do so. The comedy of the novel gets a little tempered as we see what a strong-minded, unartistic, determined man can do to a woman who is creative and clever but unsure of herself – particularly if she is in love with him.
But the real love story in the novel, in my opinion, is between Frances and both Sidonia and Lady Shore. There are moments in the novel where Sidonia is very clear in her love for Frances, even if it framed as friendship – “Frances, look at me! Don’t you love me? Frances, won’t you be my friend? All, all my friend? I don’t want to marry anyone, I tell you; I just want to work and have you, all of you.” I suspect these lines would have been more heavily censored if A Saturday Life had been published after The Well of Loneliness, rather than before. But even beyond these heightened moments (that are not really reciprocated), the relationship that Frances manages to sustain with both mother and daughter is fascinating, moving and sometimes beautiful. The three women are so different, and the three sides of the relationship triangle could scarcely differ more, and Hall does it all so well.
My 1925 Club read was a series of surprises. First, that Hall was so funny. Second, that the comic novel had such melancholy undertones. Third, that the real star of the novel would be Frances, who lives so much in the background.
