Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
49 - Novels of same-sex desire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The novel before “the novel”
- 2 Biographical form in the novel
- 3 Legal discourse and novelistic form
- 4 Novelistic history
- 5 Interiorities
- 6 Samuel Richardson
- 7 Domesticities and novel narratives
- 8 Obscenity and the erotics of fiction
- 9 Cognitive alternatives to interiority
- 10 The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms
- 11 Money's productivity in narrative fiction
- 12 “The southern unknown countries”: imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel
- 13 Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel
- 14 Extraordinary narrators: metafiction and it-narratives
- 15 Romance redivivus
- 16 Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre
- 17 Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction
- 18 How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope
- 19 From Wollstonecraft to Gissing: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative
- 20 Spaces and places (I): the four nations
- 21 Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits
- 22 Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray
- 23 The novel amid new sciences
- 24 George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories
- 25 The Bildungsroman
- 26 The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist
- 27 Clamors of eros
- 28 The novel as immoral, anti-social force
- 29 Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction
- 30 Realism and romance
- 31 Spaces and places (II): around the globe
- 32 Imperial romance
- 33 The art novel: Impressionists and aesthetes
- 34 The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form
- 35 Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy
- 36 Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner
- 37 Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I)
- 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II)
- 39 Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels
- 40 Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930–1990
- 41 The novel amid other discourses
- 42 The novel and thirty years of war
- 43 Thrillers
- 44 Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism
- 45 The series novel: a dominant form
- 46 The novel's West Indian revolution
- 47 Postwar renewals of experiment, 1945–1979
- 48 The novel amid new technology and media
- 49 Novels of same-sex desire
- 50 From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel
- 51 The postcolonial novel: history and memory
- 52 History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn
- 53 Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity
- 54 Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
After Jonathan Cape was issued with a summons to appear at Bow Street court in November 1928 for having published The Well of Loneliness, the novel's author, Radclyffe Hall, spent part of the tense wait for trial listening to her lover, Una Troubridge, reading aloud from Virginia Woolf's new book, Orlando. Hall's novel would be banned; Woolf's would not. The two works represent contrasting tendencies in queer fiction: in Hall, an engagement – albeit a pessimistic one – with the social given; in Woolf, an optimistic speculation on alternative possibilities.
The central character of Hall's book, Stephen Gordon, is lonely because she is an “invert” – that is her fate. Congenitally third-sexed, slim-hipped from the cradle, she and another woman of her own masculine kind could never love each other. Yet when she does fall in love with a suitably opposite, feminine woman, conscience forces her to give her up, because such a paragon of real womanhood as Mary Llewellyn can only be fulfilled by getting married to a man and bearing children. Although Stephen is presented as a case study, she is hardly typical. She is anomalous even within her own category of anomalies. Upper class and rich, expressing her author's deeply conservative attitudes to the ownership and husbandry of land, the hierarchy of social order, and the superiority of Englishness, she is disabled by the thought that her lesbianism excludes her from the enjoyment of her natural class privileges.
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- The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 791 - 806Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012