The Master of the House
novel by Radcliffe Hall
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.
Una Troubridge — Hall's partner — described the novel as being about a "modern Christ figure"; the University of London has noted speculation that Hall wrote it as "expiation" for having inspired Beresford Egan's "blasphemous" cartoon of Hall being crucified.
The Spectator considered that it was "a solid, full story", with "a high seriousness of purpose", but faulted Hall's use of symbolism, claiming that this makes the story "totter dangerously".
Hall's biographers have been divided over the novel's quality, with Sally Cline (in her 1997 Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John) describing it as Hall's "greatest novel", and Richard Dellamora (in his 2011 Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing) stating that it "disappoint(ed ...) nearly everyone" and "diminished both Hall's reputation and the size of her [readership]"
It was republished in 2013 by Wylie Press (ISBN 978-1473311886).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Master of the House” is novel by Radcliffe Hall. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Master, House and novel, not as a finished interpretation.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55635379. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1932, 1928, 1997 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Master of the House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.