Compton Mackenzie, _Extraordinary Women_

SO, THIS IS the other English novel focusing on lesbian characters published in 1928. It appeared just a month after Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, in fact, but did not run into any of the censorship or legal troubles that Hall's novel did. Because Mackenzie was male? Because Extraordinary Women is comical rather than earnest? One wonders.

So far as posterity goes, Mackenzie's novel came a long way short of the fame eventually achieved by   Hall's, but it is a brisk and enjoyable read. It is set shortly after World War I on the island of Sirene (based on Capri) and tracks the alliances, antagonisms, passions, and vendettas of a cosmopolitan group of lesbians, mostly wealthy, or formerly wealthy (in the case of the Russian emigrées), or expecting to be wealthy (in the cased of Rosalba Donsante, who stands to inherit her aunt's fortune).

The dominant characters are Rory Fremantle and Olimpia Leigh, both a little older, both of independent means, both intellectually formidable, and both for the moment intrigued by the impulsive and beautiful Rosalba. She flirts recklessly with both, and with a few other members of the cast. How will this resolve?

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell.

"With the exception of Rory Freemantle, the charcters and events in Extraordinary Women are all based upon real people and actual events," writes Andro Linklater in the introduction to the paperback edition I read, mentioning Romaine Brooks and Renata Borgatti. At least a few people think that Rory is based on Radclyffe Hall. I hope she is, because Rory is a lot more interesting--wittier, more commanding, perhaps even of deeper spiritual resources--than Stephen Gordon, the character in The Well of Loneliness that Hall based on herself. Even though the novel is mainly comic, it has its moments of emotional power, and most of them involve Rory.

Mackenzie apparently got to observe this set from near at hand because many of them were friends with his wife, Faith. And even though he is less than reverential, not even very charitable, and often even willing to mock, the novel is invaluable, I'd say, in giving us a portrait, caricatured though it is, of these women who were, as the title says, extraordinary.

No fewer than three delightful chapters (16-18) are devoted to a party at Rory's villa, and I will close with Mackenzie's philosophy of parties:

A great party should be a world within a world, not a world temporarily outside it. It should effect a heightening and a concentration of ordinary life, so that in retrospect one may perceive the quintessential selvcs of the guests; and when those guests meet each other for the first time after such a party they should feel a kind of sacred elation such as we may suppose was felt by those who had been initiated into the Mysteries.