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BALL, EDWARD / REF: GORDON LANGLEY HALL / DAWN LANGLEY SIMMONS Peninsula of Lies - Dawn Langley Simmons / Gordon Langley Hall - a True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. 2004 Later Printing. Hard Cover in Dust Jacket. 6 -1/2 x 9 x 1/2 " 0743235606 2004 Hardcover in DJ later printing ... Brand new from publisher ... Excellent Gift Giving quality ... Never opened, Never owned , Never marked ... Jacket protected in New, clear, non-stick Mylar sleeve ... 271 pages Peninsula of Lies is a true mystery story ... set in haunting locales and people with fascinating characters, that unwraps the enigma of a woman named Dawn Langley Simmons, a British writer who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1960s and became the focus of one of the most unusual sexual scandals of the last century ... Born in England sometime before World War II, Dawn Langley Simmons began life as a boy named Gordon Langley Hall ... Gordon was the son of servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the estate of Vita Sakville-West, where as a child he met Vita's lover Virginia Woolfe ... In his twenties, Gordon made his way to New York, where he became an author of society biographies and befriended such grandes dames as the actress Margaret Rutherford and the artist and heiress Isabel Whitney, who left him a small fortune ... The money allowed Gordon to buy a mansion in Charleston and fill it with period furniture, providing a stage for him to entertain more great ladies and to climb the social ladder of the Southern gentry to its heights ... However, Gordon's world changed instantly in 1968, when at The Johns Hopkins Hospital he underwent one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries, returning to Southern society and scandalizing Charleston as the new Dawn Langley Hall ... Dawn Hall furthermore announced that her surgery had been corrective, because she'd actually been misidentified as a boy at birth ... Three months later, Dawn raised the stakes in still-segregated Charleston when she arranged her very public marriage to a young black mechanic, John-Paul Simmons ... In due course, Dawn appeared around town pregant; finally, she could be seen pushing a baby carriage with a child - her daughter Natasha ... National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball has written a real-life detective story that deciphers the riddle of Dawn Simmons, a once rich and infamous changeling who died in 2000, her sexual identity never determined ... This is an engrossing narrative of a person who tested every taboo, as well as the confidence of observers in their own eyes ... Gordon Langley Hall 1922 - 2000 , a biographer who underwent one of the most celebrated gender switches in the 1960s, is the focus of this expose of Southern snobbery. English by birth, Langley Hall was the son of a maidservant at Sissinghurst Castle, which had earlier been made famous by Vita Sackville-West in the 1930s ... Leaving England in the bleak postwar era, he eventually made his way to New York, where, after befriending an elderly heiress, he inherited enough of her money to start a new life in the "Peninsula of Lies," Charleston, South Carolina ... After his operation at the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins, the first U.S. hospital for sex change operations, and now Newly a woman, "Dawn Pepita Hall" married her mechanic in a lavish church ceremony, defying at once not only gender expectations and the racial codes of the American South, for she was white, her husband black and the year 1969 ... Author Edward Ball 's ' Slaves in the Family ' won the National Book Award ... " Peninsula of Lies - A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love " ... by Edward Ball ... published by Simon & Schuster, New York ... 2004 Hardcover in Dustjacket ... ***. New/New .
Offered for US$ 24.95 by: Cavendish International Books & Music - Book number: 6075
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