Radclyffe Hall, joint author of The Well of Loneliness, once remarked about her alter ego, Lady Una Troubridge: "Had I been a man, I should have married Una." In effect, she virtually did and they proved almost a model couple. Their famous novel of Lesbianism today seems as unconsciously comic as Lady Chatterley's Lover, which it rather resembles, but at the time (late Twenties) it caused a scandal and, of course, became the book everyone wanted to read. Radclyffe Hall herself had survived a miserable childhood to become a strange mixture of manipulative schemer and utter eccentric; Una, the "feminine" partner, had survived a loveless marriage to an insensitive admiral. Diana Souhami has already written a good biography of the artist Gluck, and this makes an effective follow-on.