‘Branches and Roots’: Propagating Queer Resilience in 1920s British Fiction

This thesis examines the relationship between ecology and queerness in the works of four British writers of the 1920s: D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. The title, ‘Branches and Roots’, is taken from Woolf’s diary entry of Monday 20th July 1925 in which she discusses the writing process of To the Lighthouse: ‘I think [...] that when I begin [writing] I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches & roots which I do not perceive now’. Taking Woolf’s phrase as a starting point, the writer examines the ways in which these writers subvert cultural expectations of queerness as the denatured shadow of reproductive heterosexuality. While the earliest of the novels, The Fox, implies that embedding queerness in a landscape leads to environmental collapse, the works of Hall, Woolf, and Warner all allow for a more hopeful queer ecology. A close reading of these texts shows an organic environment that embraces a range of sexual and gender identities; and, further, the ebb and flow of nature finds an echo in the characters’ sexual and emotional fluidity. Faced with the Obscene Publications Act (1857), which made it a statutory offence to produce any material deemed to be obscene for ‘the Purpose of Sale or Distribution’, works, like The Well of Loneliness, which fell foul of the act faced seizure and destruction. The threat of censorship often prevented an explicit representation of homosexual relationships in fiction, yet the writers considered here portray flourishing relationships between queer individuals that often escape the heterosexual gaze. The writer argues that in situating explicitly lesbian, queer and queer- coded characters firmly in the natural world, and focusing on the ways in which they develop affinities with both their environment and one another, these writers make a claim for a productive and reproductive queer ecology. These fictional ecologies allow lesbian and queer characters to reclaim the social and literary peripheries, putting down roots that will provide a pattern of growth for later writers.