Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall (The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature Series)

In 1934, after 20 years of a mostly monogamous relationship with Una Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, author of the notorious lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, fell in love with someone else. Evguenia Souline, a poor, friendless, Russian exile living in Europe, had 30 years to Hall's 54. To Hall, Souline was the picture of a virgin maiden in distress. Hall's obsessive relationship with Souline, Joanne Glasgow argues in her introduction, precipitated the author's creative and physical decline. These letters to Souline, written between 1934 and 1942, the year Hall died, contain Hall's ideas about the origins of homosexuality, the obligations of marriage and passion, political opinions, and ideas about art. Perhaps most poignantly, they are records of the daily, sometimes hourly, fluctuations of a nervous lover's anxieties and desires. The Radclyffe Hall of these letters is a flawed, vulnerable, utterly human woman who passes through romantic obsession to avuncular concern for a young charge she met late in life.