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 Lord Berners’s The Girls of Radcliff Hall, even that proved insufficient. Disguised as a schoolgirl satire, privately printed in a tiny edition, and later pulped at Cecil Beaton’s insistence, this novella offers a thinly veiled portrait of the Bright Young Things at their most vain, jealous, and ridiculous. Berners barely bothers to conceal the identities of his targets. Peter Watson appears as the wealthy and capricious Lizzie, while Cecil Beaton becomes the lovesick Cecily, forever pursuing an affection that is never quite returned. For decades the book was more legendary than available, circulating largely by reputation until this limited edition finally made it accessible again. One original copy surfaced at the estate sale of Carl Van Vechten, where the auction house, unaware that the work was a roman à clef, catalogued it simply as lesbian fiction, a description that would have amused Lord Berners enormously.
“’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