‘Our Three Selves:’ Radclyffe Hall and Mabel Batten’s Lived Catholicism

Abstract

For British Catholic women, conversion was an empowering choice for oneself, rather than a path towards gaining institutionalized power. Lay female converts at the turn of the century were generally privileged, with a worldly understanding of the role of women in British society. Many converts drew on the spirit of female independence at the end of the 19th century to contest their place in British society. For some, their social and financial capital offered an additional position of power from which to push on notions of traditional Britishness and femininity. To have the freedom to choose conversion at all exemplifies this feeling of bodily and mental autonomy rarely exhibited by many women during the late 19th century and early 20th century. This article sheds new light on the expansiveness of the lived, lay Catholic experience in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the examples of Mabel Batten (1857–1916) and Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943).