First page of Radclyffe Hall’s Two and One: Comedy in 3 Acts, ca. 1925. Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Collection. Harry Ransom Center.
by LIBBY CARR
English author Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) was one of the first authors to make lesbians visible in mainstream literature, and a forerunner of queer authors in the 20th-century. Her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness was scrutinized in several trials for containing “obscene” content. Despite or partially due to the controversy, The Well of Loneliness became extremely popular and remains a groundbreaking work of lesbian literature. In 1996, the Harry Ransom Center acquired a series of Hall’s published and unpublished works including an undated fragment of a 3-act play entitled Two and One. It is the only dramatic work attributed to Hall, never published and never produced. The addition of this play to Hall’s works allows us to examine her life beyond The Well of Loneliness and beyond all of her known works previously studied. Two and One is an exploration of misogyny and Victorian womanhood, a dynamic compliment to Hall’s better-known work.
Ostensibly, the first act of Two and One is a domestic dispute. However, Hall engages with upper middle-class domestic minutiae very intentionally to reveal themes of misogyny and male hypocrisy. In the first act, Gilbert, the man of the house, continuously accuses his wife Hermione of incompetence. He persistently finds fault with all her actions and treats her like a child. But Hermione effortlessly turns every accusation into an example of Gilbert’s arrogance. Hall uses Hermione’s intelligence to expose Gilbert as a misogynist and hypocrite. In the second act Gilbert is having a breakdown after discovering the hotel that he and Hermione are staying at is run by his “rotten” ex-wife. Hermione and Gilbert have opposing opinions of the ex-wife Frances. Hermione believes the two wives can “help each other” deal with Gilbert; any love Hermione may have for Gilbert is by far overshadowed by her frustration with his hypocritical behavior, and Hall presents Frances as an ally to Hermione. Gilbert, on the other hand, is repulsed by Frances and declares Hermione a madwoman when she insists on seeing her. Through Gilbert, Hall addresses the history of misogynist claims of female hysteria. Hermione is the sensible character of the play. When she is declared insane by her idiotic husband, Hall makes a statement about the history of misogynist claims of female hysteria, especially claims put upon queer women. That is where this fragment ends. But based on the character descriptions, Hall introduces Frances in the third act of the play, supplying Hermione with an ally against Gilbert.
Read the original manuscript for Two and One in the Ransom Center’s digital collections.
Two and One is undated, but it is possible to estimate when it was written. Hall and her partner Una Troubridge enjoyed a circle of artistic and literary friends in the 1920’s that included playwright Noel Coward and many of his cast members. The similarities between Coward’s plays and Two and One suggest they were written around the same time. Two and One includes similar dramatic features as many of Coward’s early plays, including an absence of plot, a shortage of conventional action, and an emphasis on dialogue. There are striking similarities between Coward’s 1925 play Fallen Angels, about two women vying for the affections of one former male lover, and Two and One: both are explorations of feminine dissatisfaction with marriage featuring stunning displays of misogyny and hypocritical husbands. In 1925, Hall had not ventured into explicitly lesbian relationships in her novels. She had, however, explored misogynistic expectations of early Victorian women, female friendships that included romantic and sexual undertones, and comedies centering polite society. If Hall was working on a few comedic novels centering upper-middle class Englanders and simultaneously taking in dramatic comedies of the same style, Two and One was likely born out of the combination, sometime between 1924 and 1926.
Hall’s 1924 novel The Unlit Lamp explores the limited opportunities for Victorian women as well as intimate female friendship. Two and One is concerned with similar issues. Limitations faced by young middle-class women in Victorian society are reflected by Elizabeth in The Unlit Lamp as an educated woman who can choose only to marry or become an impoverished teacher and similarly by Hermione, who, in choosing marriage, is wealthy but has basically no freedom. She is trapped in a marriage where she is more intelligent than her husband, who owns her. Both Elizabeth and Hermione can only level with the women they engage with in their respective stories. However, the friendship between Joan and Elizabeth in The Unlit Lamp evolves to something more romantic, while the friendship between Hermione and Frances in Two and One never gets to begin, at least not without the third act.
Two and One lacks action but is a valuable work as an early example of Hall’s ability to interrogate gender dynamics. Hall frankly addresses the gender role of women at the time through Gilbert’s lecturing: “A wife has three paramount duties in life: her husband, her children and her cook,” though it is clear Hermione can manage much more. Again and again throughout the play, Hall showcases Hermione’s wit as a counter to her arrogant husband. Hermione holds the masculine energy in Two and One. She is the smart, shingled (short-haired) foil of the feminine man, the “housekeeping husband” and “nagger” as Gilbert is described. Hall presents Gilbert, the only man in the play, as a useless fool. He exhibits every bad quality he accuses Hermione of having. Through her characterization of Hermione and Gilbert, Hall turns the explicitly gendered female protagonist of the drawing room comedy into an extremely capable young woman.
In Two and One, Hermione is queer coded not only in her appearance, but also in her behavior. In The Unlit Lamp, Hall explicitly notes short hair to be a sign of queerness. Joan, the “pioneer” lesbian, watches a younger female couple and reminisces on the type of woman “that she had once been, that in a way she still was. Active, aggressively intelligent women… not ashamed of their cropped hair.” Hermione’s character description is extremely similar to this description: “a pretty, rather flippant young woman… very smart, shingled.” Hermione’s behavior throughout Two and One corroborates her potential queerness, beyond her simply being smarter and more interesting than her husband. Hall presents Hermione as uninterested in being married to Gilbert at all. At the end of the third act as they are falling asleep in separate beds, Hermione tells Gilbert, “You’d drive any woman to suicide!” Though many of her remarks are jokes and her flippancy hides it well, Hermione behaves similarly to other queer coded characters in Hall’s novels.
The second act of Two and One sets up Hermione and Gilbert’s marriage to be fragmented in the third act and for Gilbert to be replaced. There is a moment where Hermione asks Gilbert about her relationship with Frances: “The wife is one flesh with her husband. If we’re both one flesh with you, then what are we with each other?” She is teasing him, but she is also leaning into the marital nature of their “two” to Gilbert’s “one.” Like in many of Hall’s seemingly-heterosexual works, there is a queer reading of the straight relationships in Two and One. If this play mirrors Fallen Angels, The Unlit Lamp, and Hall’s own life, the third act of Two and One would explore this hidden queer dynamic between Hermione and Frances. In her other work, Hall investigates women leaving relationships and trying to forge new ones with each other, to varying success. Two and One would not be resolved with Hermione still married to Gilbert. Hall believes she deserves more.