A short story titled "Fraulein Schwartz" is an anthologized example of her work. The eponymous heroine is an aging German woman trapped in England when the first World War began. She lives in a boarding house where war time sentiments determine her fate and that of her kitten. Her father had been a "most learned professor" in Dresden; now both her parents are dead. Fraulein Schwartz was "gentle and bewildered." The author describes a woman "whose heart was ... burdened with an overload of maternal affection...."
She adopted a stray gray kitten which she called Karl Heinrich."Those animal-loving English could not find it in them to love Karl Heinrich." When the kitten is poisoned by one of the other boarders, both she and the kitten are "crushed on the wheel, the fate of all those who are too tender-hearted."
Radclyffe-Hall is probably fairly judged on the basis of this story. A graceful prose depends on sentimentality and exaggeration for its emotional pull. She describes in this story "the fate of all those who are too tender-hearted," but this is not accurate. A closer observation would describe this human dimension as one which is mostly dangerous when combined with a lack of self-knowledge. You cannot really be "too tender-hearted" but you can certainly make stupid decisions.
According to her ODNB entry:
Despite a modern resurgence of interest in Radclyffe Hall, she does not fit easily into the stereotype of the gay or feminist pioneer. A staunch Roman Catholic after her conversion in 1912, her instincts, political and temperamental, remained deeply conservative. (By the late 1930s, indeed, she was expressing protofascist and antisemitic views.)
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