The Well of Loneliness
Redclyffe Hall
1928
Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness centers on the female protagonist Stephen Gordon, an upper-class English tomboy who feels different from other people from an early age. She comes to understand herself as an “invert,” a term used in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe to refer to gay, bi, and trans people, since same-sex attraction was understood as a gendered inversion. Stephen-given a boy’s name by her parents who had wanted a son-goes on to pursue Mary LIewellyn, whom she meets while working as an ambulance driver during World War I. Stephen’s story is ultimately an unhappy one, and Hall uses the semiautobiographical tale to plead for society’s toleration of “inverts.”
Although The Well of Loneliness is generally recognized as the first lesbian novel, some readers view Stephen as a transgender man rather than a lesbian, citing her assertion that she has always felt like a boy, her preference for boys’ and then men’s clothing, and her predisposition to engage in “male” habits and behavior,
The book’s language is never explicit: apart from kissing, sexual activity is barely described. Nonetheless, the editor of Britain’s Sunday Express claimed that it could corrupt the vulnerable. When the novel’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, tried to enlist the support of the Home Secretary against the newspaper, the plan backfired: the book was castigated for promoting “unnatural offenses” between women, and Hall and her publisher were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. After a seven-day trial, magistrate Sir Henry Chartres Biron ruled that the book was obscene and ordered its destruction, Hall’s reputation never recovered.
Despite the dehumanization faced by Hall, The Well of Loneliness has stood the test of time as an iconic text, eventually appearing in several editions and countries. It has lit the way to self-understanding for generations of LGBTQ+ people, especially lesbians, bisexual women, non-binary people, and trans people, though some object to the way it presents their lives as full of suffering.
