Taste and the Tasteful: Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and the Culture of Queer Elitism

Abstract

This chapter considers Woolf's belief that 'high art' should deal only indirectly with sex (let alone queer sex), and how this helped shape a culture of queer elitism among modernists. Stone uses Woolf's less than enthusiastic involvement in Hall's obscenity trial to argue that she considered such reformist literature as decidedly middlebrow.