Radclyffe Hall by Richard Dellamora

Author:Richard Dellamora
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

14. A Saturday Life. Notebook no. 1, cover. Radclyffe Hall collection, 8.3. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

Above the drawings appears a handwritten sentence: “When he reads her poetry he doesn't know who she is because she has tried to submerge her personality:—But she knows Mark is the reader—.”49 In the completed novel, the adult Sidonia does not write poetry, and there is no character named Mark. Sidonia's effort to “submerge her personality” in her writing brings to mind Hall's modern ideal of aesthetic impersonality, though it also suggests other ways of looking at Sidonia from spiritualist or theosophical points of view. In her artistic vagaries and tendencies to pick up, then drop, friends and intimates, Sidonia perhaps channels other selves (or personalities) as a medium might in a trance. In a theosophical view, perhaps her present self is possessed for a time by other selves that she has been at other times and places. Sidonia's capacity for second sight, however, is much weaker than Frances's. Insofar as Sidonia shares characteristics with Troubridge, Hall may be commenting on her partner as a person of fluid and uncertain selfhood, gender, and genius. Ambiguous herself, in the quotation Sidonia makes a point of being ambiguous in her writing. As will become clear in a moment, the mysterious “Mark” referenced here resembles Troubridge in her function as literary collaborator, a role in which she submerged her personality in the joint performance of Hall's literary genius.

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