Adam's Breed was a 1926 novel by the English writer Radclyffe Hall. On its publication it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and the Femina Vie Heureuse prize for best English novel. [1] [2] It tells the story of a British-Italian waiter, a member of the Lost Generation disillusioned by life during and after World War I, who becomes a hermit.
It concerns Teresa Boselli, a strong, perhaps Amazonian, woman, and her orphaned grandson Gian-Luca who as a young man works as a waiter in London, before joining the army during World War I which he survives due to being posted to a catering position in the Army Service Corps. After the war, he is troubled by his experiences and the bloodshed of the war, even though he did not serve on the front line. Finding himself disgusted by food, he rejects his old life, becomes a hermit and lives in a forest, before he dies aged 34. [3]
Una Troubridge, Hall's partner, claimed that the novel was originally to have been called Food, but due to fears that it would be mistaken for a cookery book, the new title was selected from Rudyard Kipling's poem "Tomlinson": "I am all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that ye should give me scorn". [4]
It was published in March 1926 and with considerable promotion it proved a popular success, with its fourth reprint coming just 3 weeks after first publication. [5]
It was published by Doubleday, Page in the US and by Cassell in the UK.
In 1949, The Spectator in a not terribly positive review criticised Hall's prose style as Victorian and noted that Adam's Breed had the same plot as The Well of Loneliness and The Unlit Lamp : "lack of the right kind of love in childhood". [6]
Richard Dellamora in his study of Hall calls it her "first religious novel" and relates it to James George Frazer's The Golden Bough with the figure of a sacrifice to the Mother Goddess. Dellamora sees Gian-Luca's death as having religious symbolism, with the young man partly a Christ figure, but also in his name echoing Jesus's disciples John and Luke. [3]
Natalie Clifford Barney was an American writer who hosted a literary salon at her home in Paris that brought together French and international writers. She influenced other authors through her salon and also with her poetry, plays, and epigrams, often thematically tied to her lesbianism and feminism.
Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse. The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury. They reward French-language works written in prose or verse, by both women and men. The winner is announced on the first Wednesday of November each year.
The Troubridge Baronetcy, of Plymouth, is a title in the Baronetage of Great Britain. It was created on 30 November 1799 for Captain Thomas Troubridge, a distinguished officer of the Royal Navy, who later became an admiral. The second baronet was also a Royal Navy admiral and sat as Member of Parliament for Sandwich. The third baronet fought with distinction in the Crimean War, in which he was severely wounded.
The Well of Loneliness is a lesbian novel by British author Radclyffe Hall that was first published in 1928 by Jonathan Cape. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" (homosexuality) is apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as typically suffered by "inverts", with predictably debilitating effects. The novel portrays "inversion" as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: "Give us also the right to our existence".
Ladies Almanack, its complete title being Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion, was written by Djuna Barnes in 1928. This roman à clef catalogues the amorous intrigues of Barnes' lesbian network centered in Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris. Written as a winking pastiche of Restoration wit, the slender volume is illustrated by Barnes's Elizabethan-inspired woodcuts.
Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge was a British sculptor and translator. She is best known as the long-time lesbian partner of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness.
Jean-Paul Dubois is a French journalist and author. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2019 for Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon, a novel told from the perspective of a prisoner looking back on life. The jury compared Dubois to John Irving and William Boyd, who wrote books that were both popular and critical successes.
Alison Hennegan is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. She is also a prominent campaigner for gay and lesbian rights in the UK and a journalist.
Claire Etcherelli is a French novelist. She won the Prix Femina for her 1967 debut novel, Elise, or the Real Life, which was also adapted into a 1970 film. Her main characters are women and the plots take place in real-life cities such as Paris. She was influenced by Honoré de Balzac.
Admiral Sir Ernest Charles Thomas Troubridge, was an officer of the Royal Navy who served during the First World War.
William – an Englishman is a 1919 novel by Cicely Hamilton. The novel explores the effect of the First World War on a married couple during the rise of Socialism and the Suffragette movement. It was originally published by Skeffington & Son before being reprinted by Persephone Books in 1999. Described as 'a passionate assertion of the futility of war' by The Spectator, William - an Englishman won the first Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse Anglais prize in 1920.
Gabrielle Enthoven was an English playwright, amateur actress, theatre archivist, and prolific collector of theatrical ephemera relating to the London stage. In 1911, Enthoven began campaigning for the establishment of a theatrical section in one of the British museums. In 1924, the Victoria and Albert Museum accepted her private collection, at this time containing over 80,000 theatrical playbills and programmes. The material became the founding collection of the museum's theatre and performance archives. Enthoven's unparalleled knowledge of the London stage and its history earned her the sobriquet 'the theatrical encyclopaedia'.
André Corthis, néeAndrée Magdeleine Husson was a 20th-century French writer. She received the prix Femina in 1906. Andrée Husson is the niece of painter Rodolphe Julian.
Marguerite Borel known as Camille MarbonéeMarguerite Appell, was a 20th-century French writer, president and laureate of the Prix Femina in 1913 and president of the Société des gens de lettres.
The Master of the House is a novel written by Radclyffe Hall and published in 1932 — her first published work after her 1928 The Well of Loneliness. It depicts the life of carpenter Christophe Benedit, as well as of the other inhabitants of the small French town of St-Loup-sur-Mer.
Femina was a French magazine created on February 1, 1901 by Pierre Lafitte and discontinued in 1954. The title gave its name to the Prix Femina from 1922.
Annie Lami was an Italian literary translator, "a prolific translator of Anglo-American novels and short stories".
At Night All Blood Is Black is a novel by French author David Diop. First published in French on August 16, 2018, by Éditions du Seuil, it won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens that same year.
Pierre Antoine Baptiste René Lafitte was a French journalist, publisher and editor born 3 May 1872 in Bordeaux and died 13 December 1938 in Paris. He innovated in illustrated press and popular novel formats in France.