1928 novel by Radclyffe Hall
The Well of Loneliness is a lesbian novel by British author Radclyffe Hall that was first published in 1928 by Jonathan Cape. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" (homosexuality) is apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver during the First World War, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as the typical sufferings of "inverts", with predictably debilitating effects. The novel portrays "inversion" as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: "Give us also the right to our existence".
Shortly after the book's publication, it became the target of a campaign by James Douglas, editor of the "Sunday Express". Douglas wrote that "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." A British court judged it obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women"; not until 1949, twenty years later, was it again published in England. In the United States, the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court.
Publicity over "The Well of Loneliness"'s legal battles increased the visibility of lesbians in British and American culture. For decades it was the best-known lesbian novel in English, and often the first source of information about lesbianism that young people could find. Some readers have valued it, while others have criticised it for Stephen's expressions of self-hatred, and viewed it as inspiring shame. The novel was subject to great criticism in its time (some of which may have been motivated by prejudice) but has come to be recognised as a classic of queer literature.
The book entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
Background.
In 1926, Radclyffe Hall was at the height of her career. Her novel "Adam's Breed", about the spiritual awakening of an Italian headwaiter, had become a best-seller; it would soon win the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize. She had long thought of writing a novel about sexual inversion; now, she believed, her literary reputation would allow such a work to be given a hearing. Since she knew she was risking scandal and "the shipwreck of her whole career", she sought and received the blessing of her partner, Una Troubridge, before she began work. Her goals were social and political; she wanted to end public silence about homosexuality and bring about "a more tolerant understanding" – as well as to "spur all classes of inverts to make good through hard work...and sober and useful living".
In April 1928, she told her editor that her new book would require complete commitment from its publisher and that she would not allow even one word to be altered. "I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world...So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction." One of the reasons Hall cited for making the book, was that she wanted to be the first person to "smash the conspiracy of silence" about sexual inversion.
Social and cultural context.
Paris lesbian and gay subculture.
In Hall's time, Paris was known for having a relatively large and visible gay and lesbian community – in part because France, unlike England, had no laws against male homosexuality. Marcel Proust's novels continued in their influence upon 1920s Parisian society depicting lesbian and gay subculture. When Stephen first travels to Paris, at the urging of her friend Jonathan Brockett – who may be based on Noël Coward – she has not yet spoken about her inversion to anyone. Brockett, acting as tour guide, hints at a secret history of inversion in the city by referring to Marie Antoinette's rumoured relationship with the Princesse de Lamballe.
Brockett next introduces Stephen to Valérie Seymour, who – like her prototype, Natalie Clifford Barney – is the hostess of a literary salon, many of whose guests are lesbians and gay men. Immediately after this meeting Stephen announces she has decided to settle in Paris at 35 Rue Jacob (purchased at Seymour's recommendation), with its temple in a corner of an overgrown garden. Barney lived and held her salon at 20 Rue Jacob. Stephen is wary of Valérie, and does not visit her salon until after the war, when Brockett persuades her that Mary is becoming too isolated. She finds Valérie to be an "indestructible creature" capable of bestowing a sense of self-respect on others, at least temporarily: "everyone felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour's". With Stephen's misgivings "drugged", she and Mary are drawn further into the "desolate country" of Paris gay life. At Alec's Bar – the worst in a series of depressing nightspots – they encounter "the battered remnants of men who...despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation".
Many of those familiar with the subculture she described, including her own friends, disagreed with her portrayal of it; Romaine Brooks called her "a digger-up of worms with the pretension of a distinguished archaeologist". Hall's correspondence shows that the negative view of bars like Alec's that she expressed in "The Well" was sincerely meant, but she also knew that such bars did not represent the only homosexual communities in Paris. It is a commonplace of criticism that her own experience of lesbian life was not as miserable as Stephen's. By focusing on misery and describing its cause as "ceaseless persecution" by "the so-called just and righteous", she intensified the urgency of her plea for change.
World War I.
Although Hall's author's note disclaims any real-world basis for the ambulance unit that Stephen joins, she drew heavily on the wartime experiences of her friend Toupie Lowther, co-commander of the only women's unit to serve on the front in France. Lowther, like Stephen, came from an aristocratic family, adopted a masculine style of dress, and was an accomplished fencer, tennis player, motorist and jujitsu enthusiast. In later years she said the character of Stephen was based on her, which may have been partly true.
In "The Well of Loneliness", war work provides a publicly acceptable role for inverted women. The narrative voice asks that their contributions not be forgotten and predicts that they will not go back into hiding: "a battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded". This military metaphor continues later in the novel when inverts in postwar Paris are repeatedly referred to as a "miserable army". Hall invokes the image of the shell-shocked soldier to depict inverts as psychologically damaged by their outcast status: "for bombs do not trouble the nerves of the invert, but rather that terrible silent bombardment from the batteries of God's good people".
Christianity and spiritualism.
Hall, who had converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1912, was devoutly religious. She was also a believer in communication with the dead and had once hoped to become a medium – a fact that brought her into conflict with the church, which condemned spiritualism. Both these beliefs made their way into "The Well of Loneliness".
Stephen, born on Christmas Eve and named after the first martyr of Christianity, dreams as a child that "in some queer way she [is] Jesus". When she discovers that Collins, object of her childhood crush, has housemaid's knee, she prays that the affliction be transferred to her: "I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus – I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins – I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were". This childish desire for martyrdom prefigures Stephen's ultimate self-sacrifice for Mary's sake. After she tricks Mary into leaving her – carrying out a plan that leads Valérie to exclaim "you were made for a martyr!" – Stephen, left alone in her home, sees the room thronged with inverts, living, dead and unborn. They call on her to intercede with God for them and finally possess her. It is with their collective voice that she demands of God, "Give us also the right to our existence".
After Stephen reads Krafft-Ebing in her father's library, she opens the Bible at random, seeking a sign, and reads Genesis 4:15, "And the Lord set a mark upon Cain ..." Hall uses the mark of Cain, a sign of shame and exile, throughout the novel as a metaphor for the situation of inverts. Her defence of inversion took the form of a religious argument: God had created inverts, so humanity should accept them. "The Well"'s use of religious imagery outraged the book's opponents, but Hall's vision of inversion as a God-given state was an influential contribution to the language of LGBT rights.
Plot summary.
The book's protagonist, Stephen Gordon, is born in the late Victorian era to upper-class parents in Worcestershire who are expecting a boy and who christen her with the name they had already chosen. Even at birth she is physically unusual, a "narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby". She hates dresses, wants to cut her hair short and longs to be a boy. At seven she develops a crush on a housemaid named Collins and is devastated when she sees Collins kissing a footman.
Stephen's father, Sir Phillip, dotes on her; he seeks to understand her through the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first modern writer to propose a theory of homosexuality, but does not share his findings with Stephen. Her mother, Lady Anna, is distant, seeing Stephen as a "blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction" of Sir Phillip. At eighteen Stephen forms a close friendship with a Canadian man, Martin Hallam, but is horrified when he declares his love for her. The following winter Sir Phillip is crushed by a falling tree; at the last moment he tries to explain to Lady Anna that Stephen is an invert but dies without managing to do so.
Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbour. Angela uses Stephen as an "anodyne against boredom", allowing her "a few rather schoolgirlish kisses". The pair conduct a relationship that, although not explicitly stated, seems to have some sexual element, at least for Stephen. Then Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Fearing exposure, Angela shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends a copy to Stephen's mother. Lady Anna denounces Stephen for "presum[ing] to use the word love in connection with...these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body." Stephen replies, "As my father loved you, I loved...It was good, good, "good" – I'd have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby." After the argument Stephen goes to her father's study and for the first time opens his locked bookcase. She finds a book by Krafft-Ebing – assumed by critics to be "Psychopathia Sexualis", a text about homosexuality and paraphilias – and, reading it, learns that she is an invert.
Stephen moves to London and writes a well-received first novel. Her second novel is less successful, and her friend, the playwright Jonathan Brockett, himself an invert, urges her to travel to Paris to improve her writing through a fuller experience of life. There she makes her first, brief contact with urban invert culture, meeting the lesbian salon hostess Valérie Seymour. During World War I she joins an ambulance unit, eventually serving at the front and earning the Croix de Guerre. She falls in love with a younger fellow driver, Mary Llewellyn, who comes to live with her after the war ends. They are happy at first, but Mary becomes lonely when Stephen returns to writing. Rejected by polite society, Mary throws herself into Parisian nightlife. Stephen believes Mary is becoming hardened and embittered and feels powerless to provide her with "a more normal and complete existence".
Martin Hallam, now living in Paris, rekindles his old friendship with Stephen. In time, he falls in love with Mary. Persuaded that she cannot give Mary happiness, Stephen pretends to have an affair with Valérie Seymour to drive her into Martin's arms. The novel ends with Stephen's plea to God: "Give us also the right to our existence!"
Sexology.
Hall describes "The Well of Loneliness" as "The first long and very serious novel entirely upon the