ABSTRACT
The literary lives—if not the actual lives—of Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf were remarkably intertwined. Throughout the 1920s, both writers were preoccupied with so-called “women’s” issues; while those issues ranged from economic independence to freedom of expression, Woolf and Hall were simultaneously interested in the literary representation of same-sex female desire. 1 Certainly both women’s experiences with queerness had distinct manifestations, and, as such, their works representing that desire differ substantially, with particular regard to the dynamic between sex and gender. As Ellen Bayuk Rosenman explains, in the early twentieth century, given the implications of circulating sexological theories, “lesbian sexual practice was conflated with male gender identity” (640). Although Hall’s “dramatically masculine appearance”—along with that of her 1920s heroines, Miss Ogilvy and Stephen Gordon—could be considered evidence of this theoretical overlap, Woolf’s queer experiences with Violet Dickinson and Vita Sackville-West seemed to counter the sexological narratives of the time (Rosenman 641).
