The Girls of Radcliff Hall by Lord Berners
Lord Berners. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Limited Edition of 250 copies. 2000. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Edited by John Byrne.
“The truth is so rare and precious that sometimes it must be kept under lock and key,” cautioned Hilary Mantel. In the case of this book, it must even be disguised as fiction, privately printed in limited edition, and even then, most of those copies must be destroyed, at the insistence of Cecil Beaton. Such is the case with Lord Berners’s satirical novella, The Girls of Radcliff Hall, in which he lays bare the egos, dramas, and tantrums of his “Bright Young Things” coterie. He offers them the barest of disguises, misgendering them as immature English boarding-school girls with sapphic crushes on their classmates. The plot centers upon the wealthy and privileged Lizzie (Peter Watson) who alternately jilts and then leads on the lovesick Cecily (Cecil Beaton), before stealing the affections of the avaricious Millie (Robert Heber-Percy), much to the chagrin of headmistress Miss Carfax (Lord Berners himself). Watching from the sidelines are the gossipy Olive (Oliver Messel) and the vindictive Daisy (David Herbert). The title is a pun as well, a tease on writer Radcliffe Hall, whose lesbian-themed novel The Well of Loneliness was then banned in the UK. Until this modern limited edition, The Girls of Radcliff Hall was much talked about but seldom read, because copies were impossible to find. One such original turned up at the estate auction of Carl Van Vechten. The auction house, unaware it was a roman à clef, labeled it as lesbian fiction. Another copy, signed by Berners to Noel Coward, has also turned up for sale, cheeky considering that Coward’s lover at the time, Jack Wilson, was portrayed in the book as Helene de Troy, another of Lizzie’s (Peter’s) money-grubbing conquests.
“’It’s really too preposterous,’ Daisy was saying, ‘that Lizzie should have so many ‘crushes.’ She’s had more ‘crushes’ than any other girl in the school, and how she manages it with that tow-coloured hair and that awful complexion I just can’t imagine.’”
--Lord Berners