The Well of Loneliness

By Radclyffe Hall and Esther Saxey

‘As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved…It was good, good, good…’

Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents – a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions. The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848705678

Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) was an English poet and novelist. Born to a wealthy English father and an American mother in Bournemouth, Hampshire, Hall was left a sizeable fortune following her parents’ separation in 1882. Raised in a troubled environment, Hall struggled to gain financial independence from her mother and stepfather. As she took control of her inheritance, Hall began dressing in men’s clothing and identifying herself as a “congenital invert.” In 1907, she began a relationship with amateur singer Mabel Batten, who encouraged Hall to pursue a career in literature. By 1917, she had fallen in love with sculptor Una Troubridge, a cousin of Batten’s. After several poetry collections, Hall’s second novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was published, becoming a bestseller shortly thereafter. Adam’s Breed (1926), a novel about an Italian waiter who abandons modern life, earned Hall the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize, two of the most prestigious awards in world literature. In 1928, Hall’s sixth novel, The Well of Loneliness, was published to widespread controversy for its depiction of lesbian romance. While an obscenity trial in the United Kingdom led to an order that all copies of the novel be destroyed, a lengthy trial in the United States eventually allowed the book’s publication. Recognized as a pioneering figure in lesbian literature, Hall lived in London with Una Troubridge until her death at the age of sixty-three.

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The Well of Loneliness

Radclyffe Hall

with an introduction and notes

by Esther Saxey

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

This edition of The Well of Loneliness first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2005

Introduction and Notes © Esther Saxey 2005

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 567 8

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For my husband

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with love from your wife, the publisher

Eternally grateful for your unconditional

love, not just for me but for our children,

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General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

1

The Well of Loneliness is a vibrant account of passion between women. The heroine Stephen Gordon spends her childhood as an aristocratic tomboy; as an adult, she becomes a war hero, writer and lover of other women. The novel is a work of propaganda; it tries one strategy after another to enlist reader sympathy for Stephen, and for the ‘miserable army’ of men and women like her. Because of this agenda, it was banned for obscenity within four months of its publication.

Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, known to friends as ‘John’, was born in 1880. As a child she was close to her grandmother; her father was absent, and her mother and stepfather abusive. She became independently wealthy on her father’s death. By the time Hall began writing The Well, she was living with her second long-term lover, Una Troubridge, and was prominent in fashionable London and Parisian society. She favoured tailored clothing, cropped her hair and smoked cigarettes. Her most recent novel, Adam’s Breed (1926) had won two prestigious prizes. This literary success inspired her to risk a deeply personal project, motivated by her own experience and her sense of social injustice: ‘a book on sexual inversion, a novel that would be accessible to the general public who did not have access to technical treatises . . . to speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority’. (Hall’s intentions as summarised in Troubridge’s biography, p. 81). This crusading book was to be The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928.

Initial reviews of the novel were measured and mostly favourable. However, the editor of the the Sunday Express, James Douglas, savagely attacked The Well: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a vial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’ In response, the publisher Jonathan Cape submitted a copy to the Home Secretary, and on his advice, withdrew the novel in the UK. However, Cape continued publishing and importing the novel from Paris – it was already on its third printing, and the scandal had increased demand. The novel was seized by customs, prosecuted for obscenity in November and banned.

The Well became an international bestseller, and retained its status as the ‘Lesbian bible’ for the length of the twentieth century. Many other novels featuring relationships between women have been popular: lesbian pulp novels were a bestselling genre in the 1950s and 60s, including Ann Bannon’s series of ‘Beebo Brinker’ novels (published between 1957–62). In subsequent decades, novels such as Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) were influential in feminist and lesbian politics. No individual novel, however, has challenged The Well’s pre-eminence. Its fame has been sustained by successive generations of readers; its portrayal of a dashing heroine who loves women is still rare, and its charm as a period piece has increased over time. Its fierce detractors have also kept it in the limelight.

However, The Well is not a ‘bible’. Nor is it a template or an instruction manual for love between women, although it has been read in this way for decades. It is rather an intense examination of the meaning of gender identity, and of love between women, through the lens of one author’s beliefs. Hall created Stephen at a time when gender roles and sexual identities were in flux; several explanations and perspectives, new and old, were available to her when she wrote. Sometimes Hall uses sexual science from the late nineteenth century; she was a keen reader of the sexologists, scientific and medical writers on human sexuality. At other times she calls on biblical and Christian analogy; Hall was a Catholic convert and found great spiritual support in the faith. And The Well is also a social protest novel. Hall minutely describes prejudice against those outside the sexual norm, and the effects of such prejudice on her characters. The novel calls for change, and also seeks to create change, influencing the reader through its painful descriptions. Sometimes these differing approaches work harmoniously together; often they pull in opposing directions. But it is through the complexity of these multiple perspectives that Stephen comes to life. Stephen must search for identity in a world that has little understanding or acceptance of gender variation, or of love between women. Her struggle to find her place, ‘unexplained as yet’, has made her one of the most appealing and problematic heroines of twentieth-century fiction.

2

Hall set out to write what had never (to her knowledge) been written before, and to do so she needed to create a new narrative form. She drew on various established genres, including the medical case study, the romance and the Bildungsroman (a novel which describes the journey of the hero to adulthood and self-knowledge). From this combination came a new kind of narrative, specifically designed to depict and discuss sexual identity – an early example of a now familiar genre, the ‘coming-out story’.

This form of narrative traces the childhood and adolescence of the protagonist, noting moments of significant unusual behaviour. The protagonist must interpret these clues from their own life, and eventually solve the riddle of their identity. The childhood of Stephen is one long quest to answer the question posed by her existence. The opening half of the book comes to resemble a detective story. The clues are presented: Stephen’s physical characteristics, her declarations and the reactions of others. The reader races against Stephen, her father and other characters, and even against the narrator, to discover the truth of Stephen’s identity.

Initially, Stephen’s father takes the lead. He observes clues: Stephen dressing as Nelson, her physical masculinity, and her problematic relationship with her mother. He believes he understands what these signify, and makes a diagnosis far in advance of the other characters. That solution, though, leads to another dilemma – whether or not to tell Stephen and her mother what he has discovered. Other characters, confused and well meaning, are far behind Sir Philip. Then the educated and experienced Puddle arrives, and also perceives Stephen’s identity at once (possibly because she shares Stephen’s predicament). Puddle cannot give this information to Stephen; to do so would lead to Puddle being sacked, leaving Stephen friendless. It is still Sir Philip’s duty to tell Stephen, but he dies before he can do so.

The omniscient narrator, too, can be viewed as a character. The narrator either stands alongside the heroine, sympathising with her plight, or works to establish a relationship between the heroine and the reader; there are many moments where the narrator guides the reader by directly addressing her, crying out like an onlooker, in anguish – ‘Oh, poor and most desolate body!’ (p. 169) – or with disdain – ‘Oh, yes, the whole business was rather pathetic’ (p. 324). In the narrator’s role as an independent commentator, he/she is the next ‘character’ to become certain of Stephen’s identity. During Stephen’s romance with a married American neighbour, Angela Crossby, the narrator confidently announces Stephen’s identity: ‘None knew better the terrible nerves of the invert, nerves that are always lying in wait’ (p. 139) The narrator often makes explicit the thoughts of other characters, and may be speaking for Puddle in this statement. But the narrator uses a similar phrase later, unprompted: ‘And now the terrible nerves of the invert, those nerves that are always lying in wait, gripped Stephen’ (p. 167).

Strangely, then, three different ‘characters’ have independently decided what Stephen is, but her father will not tell her, and the other two cannot. The reader therefore desperately wants Stephen to seize a label for herself. But Stephen is confused and hesitant, and moves slowly to self-examination. When she sees her father prematurely ageing, she reflects: ‘He is bearing a burden, not his own, it’s someone else’s – but whose?’ (p. 77). Again, when a good friend, Martin Hallam, turns into an unwelcome suitor, Stephen’s instinctual revulsion forces her to ask: ‘But what was she?’ (p. 90). She pores back over her life, trying to make meaning from events, treading where her father and the reader have already trod: ‘In those days, she had wanted to be a boy – had that been the meaning of the pitiful young Nelson? And what about now?’ (p. 90). She turns to her father: ‘ Is there anything strange about me, Father, that I should have felt as I did about Martin? ’ (p. 90). But her father ducks the question. When Angela Crossby asks: ‘ Can I help it if you’re – what you obviously are? ’ (p. 133), it brings Stephen distress but no insight. She asks herself: ‘Why am I as I am – and what am I?’ (p. 137). Finally she finds a source of information in her father’s locked bookshelf of sexology volumes, books that are hers ‘by some intolerable birthright’ (p. 212). She exclaims: ‘You knew! All the time you knew this thing . . . Oh, Father – there are so many of us – thousands of miserable, unwanted people . . . ’ After gossip, lies and torment, Stephen has found an identity, of sorts.

For decades, the majority of readers have assumed that Stephen claims her identity as a lesbian. This is a problematic assumption, as the novel offers competing explanations and perspectives, which I investigate further below. But before moving on to examine the kind of identity claimed, it is worth pausing to note the impact that The Well had on the formulation, and the narration, of sexual identities themselves.

The categories most often used in modern Western cultures to name same-sex attraction – gay, lesbian, bisexual – have not always existed. It is not even the case that different labels existed for essentially the same people. The very concept of a different kind of woman, who desires other women exclusively, is a comparatively modern one. French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that the homosexual was ‘invented’ in the nineteenth century. Previously, he states, same-sex sex was frequently illegal, but it was seen as a crime or sin that could be attempted by any person – like adultery, or incest. It is only from the nineteenth century onwards that same-sex sex becomes not only an act, but a clue to a type of person: a homosexual: ‘The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood.’ The Well is a key text in popularising this idea of a ‘personage’, an individual with a significantly different childhood and a tell-tale appearance. The whole of Stephen’s childhood and adolescence is presented as a puzzle. The case studies of sexologists – doctors and scientists writing about sexuality, from the later nineteenth century onwards – performed a similar task. In case studies, a mass of biographical characteristics and events are gathered to diagnose a sexual identity. It is these sexologists whom Foucault chiefly credits for ‘inventing’ the homosexual. But the sexologists were not widely read (as one regretful character in The Well notes, the masses ‘will not read medical books’ [p. 354]). The Well took the idea of a special kind of woman-loving woman, dramatically fleshed it out, and gave it a far wider circulation. Today in Britain, the notion that lesbians exist is not innovative. The Well helped to lay the foundation for this understanding of sex and desire. It also established the narrative format through which this identity would be explained and explored. Modern coming-out stories, such as Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), continue to follow the example of The Well, using incidents from childhood and adolescence to examine and prove the heroine’s lesbian identity.

But here a problem arises: what is Stephen’s secret identity? It holds so much power that Puddle could be dismissed from her job for naming it, and it drives the honourable Sir Stephen to cowardice. But the novel offers several competing explanations as to who, or what, Stephen is.

Generations of readers have thought of Stephen as a lesbian. But the clearest answer provided by the novel is that Stephen is an ‘invert’. ‘Inverts’ are observed – or invented – by sexologists writing in the late nineteenth century; there is some disagreement between sexologists, but broadly speaking, ‘inverted’ women are believed to be more mentally and physically masculine than ‘normal’ women. Inverted women also sexually desire other women. Inversion is seen as inborn, rather than developed through experience. Sir Philip’s private library contains works by sexologists, including Richard von Kraft Ebing. Kraft Ebing in his early writings argued that ‘congenital inversion’ was an inherited degenerative condition. Because inverts cannot help their desires, the law should not punish them. Although Kraft Ebing’s attack on legal discrimination was bold, his description of ‘inversion’ as degenerative equated it with alcoholism and mental illness (two of the many ‘signs’ of degeneracy according to its original theorist, Benedict Morel). By contrast, other sexologists including Havelock Ellis thought inversion was entirely compatible with mental well-being, and argued for its place in nature and in society. Hall believed herself to be an invert, and particularly admired the work of Havelock Ellis, who wrote a preface for The Well (see Notes, p. 401). Before the obscenity trial, Hall asked the defence team to carefully distinguish between ‘inversion’ and ‘perversion’. For an invert, same-sex sex was not perverse, but natural.

The narrator uses the label ‘invert’ with confidence, and introduces many of the Parisian characters in terms of their degree of inversion. Jamie is one of the most inverted, masculine not only in her feelings and mannerisms but also in her physical appearance. Describing other, less inverted characters, the narrator becomes almost boastful of his/her ability to spot invert characteristics: Pat has ankles ‘too strong and too thick for a female’ (p. 316). Margaret would be seen as ‘quite a womanly woman, unless the trained ear had been rendered suspicious by her voice . . . a boy’s voice on the verge of breaking’ (p. 318). (Havelock Ellis had measured the larynxes of inverts.)

In the works of sexologists, one cannot become an invert, one is born one; many of Stephen’s characteristics, however, could equally be seen as acquired, or developed. Her father longs for a son, gives her a masculine name and treats her as he would a boy. In return, she loves him and emulates him. Her mother is inexplicably hostile and cold to Stephen. The attitudes of her parents are presented at times as results of Stephen’s inversion; Stephen’s mother tries to blame Stephen’s identity for her own revulsion, in a self-serving retrospective assessment: ‘ I’ve felt a kind of physical repulsion, a desire not to touch or be touched by you – a terrible thing for a mother to feel [. . .] – but now I know that my instinct was right; it is you who are unnatural, not I ’ (p. 182). But couldn’t this parental behaviour equally be a causal factor in Stephen’s identity, with her mother’s coldness driving her to identify with her father?

The dispute concerning acquired versus innate sexual identity was being played out between two schools of thought at the time of The Well’s publication. Freudian psychoanalysis was becoming fashionable among modernist writers. Psychoanalytic theories argued that sexual identity developed through childhood experiences, rather than being innate. Hall seems to reject psychoanalysis (see Note 130), but Stephen’s close father and distant mother are a typical scenario, in psychoanalytic terms, for a lesbian daughter. A modern reader is, of course, more likely to be familiar with psychoanalytic theories than sexological explanations, as psychoanalysis has filtered through to influence mainstream explanations of sex, childhood and consciousness.

Whether Stephen’s identity is acquired or innate affects how the reader is to interpret her childhood. We are trained as readers to make causal connections between narrative incidents – E. M. Forster defines ‘plot’ as the causal and logical structure that connects incidents, giving the example: ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ (Aspects of the Novel, 1927). Linking events in the first half of The Well in this causal fashion makes sense if Stephen’s sexuality is acquired – each childhood event contributes to her adult identity. But this produces a very different novel than one in which Stephen is born an invert. When the narrator observes that ‘Sir Philip [. . .] longed for a son’, and Stephen states: ‘I must be a boy’, is this coincidence, or cause and effect? One scene can demonstrate the difference these two approaches might make. When young, Stephen is distressed to see the housemaid she loves kissing the footman. Stephen pours her troubles out to her father, and he tells her: ‘ And now I’m going to treat you like a boy ’ (p. 22). He asks her always to turn to him for help and not to her mother. Sir Philip’s treatment in the novel is generally shown as merciful, and indeed, if Stephen’s masculinity is inborn, his acknowledgement is an act of kindness. However, if her identity is acquired, then Sir Philip is underestimating his own considerable influence. He has made an open plea that his daughter behave more like a son, and not be so close to her mother, who encourages her to be feminine. At the end of this discussion, ‘he kissed her in absolute silence – it was like the sealing of a sorrowful pact.’ This pact is presented as a respectful response to Stephen’s invert identity – her father will treat her like a boy, and Stephen will not worry her mother with the truth. But could it be a pact that Stephen strive to please her father, and eventually grow into the identity he has diagnosed for her? Whichever it is, the pact of silence lasts until Sir Philip’s death and beyond.

Alongside the unresolved question of whether Stephen’s sexuality is innate or acquired, other perspectives on her identity are brought into play, and sometimes into conflict. Chief among these perspectives is Roman Catholic Christianity. Stephen’s and the narrator’s attempts to understand her identity through the prism and language of religion has proved one of the most difficult elements for subsequent generations of readers; Jane Rule, a feminist critic writing in the 1970s, stated that ‘the bible [Hall] offered is really no better for women than the Bible she would not reject.’ It can seem remarkable to modern readers that Stephen finds comfort not only in organised religion, but in a branch of Christianity which has been most insistent that sex be confined to heterosexual marriage. Although homosexuality was recognised by the Vatican as an innate orientation in 1975, modern Roman Catholic doctrine still states that lesbians and gay men are called to live in celibacy, and that any same-sex sexual acts are sinful.

In part, this perspective is autobiographical. Hall was herself a Catholic convert, introduced to Catholicism by her first long-term partner. Together they attended the fashionable Brompton Oratory and had a private audience with the Pope in 1913. Catholic symbolism frequently appears in Hall’s novels, culminating in The Master of the House (1932), which retells the story of Christ in modern Provence. By Troubridge’s account, Hall was greatly upset by a blasphemous cartoon that was published after the ban of The Well (depicting a crucified Hall with a naked woman leaping across her loins) and wrote The Master of the House in part to atone for this offence to her faith.

Stephen’s sexuality cannot be considered apart from her childhood Christianity and adult Catholicism. Stephen uses biblical references to name herself, often in negative ways: ‘What am I, in God’s name – some kind of abomination?’(p. 136). She writes to Angela: ‘ I’m some awful mistake – God’s mistake – I don’t know if there are any more like me, I pray not for their sakes . . . ’ (p. 179). Stephen is named after the first Christian martyr. She also identifies with other suffering biblical characters. One is Cain, the first murderer; in the speech she prepares to warn her lover Mary about the hazards of their relationship, Stephen refers to herself as ‘one of those whom God marked on the forehead’ (p. 273). Her other chief identification is with Jesus. She emotionally comprehends Jesus’ crucifixion because of the pain of her beloved housemaid, Collins:

‘I’d like to be awfully hurt for you, Collins, the way Jesus was hurt for sinners.’ [. . .]She had often been rather puzzled about Him, since she herself was fearful of pain [. . .], but now she no longer wondered. [pp. 14–15]

Through this, Hall emphasises that faith is possible for Stephen only through her love of women. This is echoed in the relationship of Jamie and Barbara: ‘For believing in Jamie she must needs believe in God, and because she loved Jamie she must love God also – it had been like this ever since they were children’ (p. 326). And Stephen’s relationships are permanently tinged with an air of martyrdom; Stephen loves Collins more because Collins is a liar, and thus ripe for salvation through Stephen, a pattern that repeats with her second love, Angela Crossby. Stephen’s moments of self-identification as Jesus or Cain may be self-hating or self-aggrandising, but they are central to her sense of identity.

Much of the time, Stephen’s difference is visible, but nameless. Angela Crossby asks, ‘Can I help it if you’re – what you obviously are?’ and Stephen’s mother states, ‘And this thing that you are is a sin against creation’ (p. 182). Angela may not wish to use the names she knows (‘pervert’, ‘degenerate creature’ [p. 180]) to Stephen’s face, and Stephen’s mother may lack any suitable vocabulary, but this silence is oppressive in itself – drawing attention to Stephen’s difference, but refusing to give Stephen a name which might acknowledge her, or inform her that there are others like her.

However, sympathetic characters also refuse to name Stephen. Puddle says, ‘just because you are what you are . . . ’ And although Stephen’s cry of, ‘Why am I as I am – and what am I?’ is apparently resolved, she still refrains from using sexological labels, or any labels at all. When meeting Valérie Seymour, Stephen fears that Valérie ‘liked me because she thought me – oh, well, because she thought me what I am.’ Stephen never refers to herself as an invert or as a lesbian.

The narrator moves between all these competing perspectives and, as a result, makes contradictory comments on Stephen’s origins. The narrator states that ‘in such relationships as Mary’s and Stephen’s, Nature must pay for experimenting’ (p. 305), implying an evolutionary (or capricious) origin for Stephen. In another moment, the narrator states that ‘God, in a thoughtless moment, had created in His turn those pitiful thousands who must stand for ever outside His blessing’ (p. 171). The narrator here echoes Puddle and Stephen’s father, both of whom rage at God for making Stephen; this seems to contradict the former, evolutionary interpretation. Nature and God as creator are sometimes aligned, sometimes judged separately. To have the omniscient narrator voicing these antagonistic alternatives is confused and confusing. It indicates the degree to which the book is built on conflicting foundations.

It is worth returning to Stephen’s scene of revelation, in Sir Philip’s study, to see how these multiple, contradictory explanations are layered together. Through reading Sir Philip’s books, including one by Kraft Ebing, Stephen seems to claim the identity that the narrator has already assigned her, of ‘invert’: ‘there are so many of us’ (p. 186), she cries. This is where I left Stephen in my earlier summary. But in the next moment, she clasps her father’s Bible, and takes a new name from there: ‘And the Lord set a mark upon Cain . . . ’ (p. 186). Then Puddle, Stephen’s governess and a figure of some authority, intervenes to provide another viewpoint: ‘ Nothing’s completely misplaced or wasted, I’m sure of that – and we’re all part of nature ’ (p. 187). Critic Laura Doan believes that Puddle voices the philosophy of Edward Carpenter, an English writer on love between men, who had a more mystical and celebratory approach than many sexologists. Puddle’s words close the scene and, enigmatically, Stephen’s response is not recorded.

So although the novel has been criticised for unilaterally supporting sexology and its ‘invert’ label, there are competing discourses working around the youthful Stephen. The many clues of Stephen’s childhood are ambivalent; the reader knows that Stephen is heading towards her identity, but each reader will have their own idea of what this identity will be – is Stephen a butch lesbian? A pervert? An invert? A transsexual? A saint or a saviour? Or something with no name at all? Wanda, a ‘struggling Polish painter . . . dark for a Pole’ (p. 317), is a fellow invert, according to the narrator, but also does not name her identity: ‘ Nor was I as my father and mother; I was – I was . . . She stopped speaking abruptly, gazing at Stephen with her burning eyes which said quite plainly: You know what I was, you understand. And Stephen nodded . . . ’ (pp. 339–40). This may be the love that dare not speak its name, but it could equally be the love for which there are many, competing names, at this point in the century, none of which Wanda or Stephen chooses to use.

3

One of Hall’s chief successes in writing The Well is to bring multiple viewpoints into an uneasy temporary unity to champion relationships between women. But can these diverse strands – God, nature and sexology – come together to support the sustained social critique that Hall attempts? Stephen’s suffering is the basis of Hall’s appeal. Stephen is established as a likeable, romantic and noble character, so that her experiences of rejection – by her first adult love, her cold mother and the initially friendly Lady Massey – hurt the reader also. But Stephen’s moments of suffering, like her childhood experiences, are clues to be interpreted. The different discourses and terminologies between which Hall shifts could offer very different explanations for such incidents.

In sexological terms, Stephen’s suffering may be the result of her innate inversion, and the resulting attraction Stephen feels to ‘normal’ women. Some of the social pressure could be removed from Stephen and Mary’s relationship, but the question is never settled as to whether there is a more basic level at which a ‘normal’ woman will always want a ‘normal’ man, rather than an inverted woman. If this is the case – that invert love is inevitably, biologically doomed – social reform will not remedy Stephen’s pain. Stephen’s mother’s rejection is similarly ambiguous. Although the mother is certainly self-serving in blaming her cruelty on Stephen, the narrator depicts a very early estrangement between them: ‘these two were strangely shy with each other – it was almost grotesque’. Stephen’s mother ‘would wake at night and ponder this thing, scourging herself in an access of contrition . . . ’ (p. 9). Presumably had Stephen’s mother been educated in her daughter’s ways by Sir Philip, she might have conquered this instinctive aversion. But the initial suggestion remains, that the invert and the ‘normal’ mother must stand somewhat apart, ‘tongue-tied, saying nothing at all’.

Stephen’s childhood faith has already demonstrated that Stephen has a propensity for suffering, and even for self-harm. For example, her childhood love, the housemaid, has a painfully swollen knee. Stephen’s love, faith and identification with Christ combine in a masochistic ritual in which she kneels on the hard floor to damage her own knees and take away her love’s pain. Near the close of the novel, Stephen reveals her final self-sacrificing plan (again for the benefit of her love) to Valérie Seymour, who advises her to risk her partner’s happiness in order to preserve her own. Stephen says she cannot. Valérie exclaims in irritation: ‘ Being what you are, I suppose you can’t – you were made for a martyr! ’ It is again uncertain what Valérie believes Stephen is that makes her martyr herself – a dutiful English gentleman? An invert, with ‘terrible nerves’ and a morbid outlook? – but Valérie ruthlessly observes that Stephen is predisposed to make herself suffer. In this light, it is easy to read Stephen’s conversion as part of her capacity for self-injury. Most obviously, the Church to which she turns condemns same-sex relationships – as Stephen herself observes: ‘What of that curious craving for religion which went hand in hand with inversion? [. . .] this was surely one of their bitterest problems. They believed, and believing they craved a blessing on what to some of them seemed very sacred – a faithful and deeply devoted union. But the Church’s blessing was not for them’ (p. 369). But more generally, this faith traditionally sees earthly suffering and self-abnegation as a route to salvation, not as a prompt for social reform. How can Catholicism therefore assist the novel’s social critique? It is true that, throughout the novel, God is called on to judge cruelty to his created animals and humans. The novel tries to unite theology and social justice in its final thundering cry: ‘Acknowledge us, O God, before the whole world’ (p. 399). But despite significant work on the part of Hall to keep these strands of God and man together, they pull in opposite directions.

Hall must redirect both sexology and Catholicism, channelling them into a unified plea for social justice. One scene in Paris is designed symbolically to bring about this unity. At the flat of Jamie, a Parisian invert, two African-American singers come to perform spirituals. Through the music, the inverts and their partners are able to express their own longings: ‘Not one of them all but was stirred to the depths by that queer, half-defiant, half-supplicating music’ (p. 329). This moment of communal feeling has been accurately named ‘cultural ventriloquism’ by critic Jean Walton. Thus, though it expands reader sympathy for the white invert characters, it belittles the black characters, who are described using racist stereotypes and eugenicist myths: ‘A crude animal Henry could be at times, with a taste for liquor and a lust for women – just a primitive force rendered dangerous by drink . . . ’

But as well as allowing the white inverts to express their discontent, the black characters help Stephen, and the reader, to negotiate the problematic tension between religion, sexology and social justice that is woven through the book. In the chapters following this scene, Stephen and Mary’s relationship is tested. They increasingly spend time in sordid ‘drug-dealing, death-dealing’ Parisian bars, as there they can socialise freely with other inverts (‘the most miserable of all those who comprised the miserable army’ p. 352). Underlying this bleak section of the novel is the fear that this misery is biologically determined: Stephen’s inversion will always wreck her attempts at romantic love; sordid bars are the ‘natural’ home of degenerate inverts and homosexuals. Also in the following chapters Stephen renews her interest in religion, and specifically in Catholicism, at the church of Sacre Coeur. Will Stephen be encouraged towards repentance, self-suppression and suffering? Between Stephen’s biology and her theology, the reader may well see no future in social reform.

The presence of the African-American characters points to another way of thinking; they represent a minority who have strategically combined social critique and spirituality. African Americans during slavery and after emancipation traditionally sought support in religion, while simultaneously working for social reform. Churches functioned as centres of grassroots political resistance. Just as US feminism in both the nineteenth century and the 1970s adopted the rhetoric and actions of African-American political campaigning, here Hall is highlighting tactics she sees as suitable for an invert-liberation campaign. Walton notes that the inverts appropriate the biblical analogies that the black characters use: when the singers ask, ‘ Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, then why not every man? ’ the narrator, speaking for the audience, responds: ‘Yes, but how long, O Lord, how long?’ (p. 330). But this identification with Daniel also highlights Stephen’s own religious identification with Cain and Jesus. Such identification is elevated from being Stephen’s individual morbid spiritual habit to being the proper rhetoric of the oppressed minority. The slave’s spiritual is enshrined as the ideal dignified, sanctified social protest, and The Well recommends a similar approach for the invert. Supplication need not defuse anger: ‘And now there rang out a kind of challenge; imperious, loud, almost terrifying’ (p. 330). The cry of Stephen at the close of the novel is the successor of the singers’ ‘challenge to the world’. This scene, then, sums up the problems and the successes of the novel. It is, exploitative and rooted in Hall’s ideas of racial and sexual biology. Nevertheless, it is an ambitious, emotionally involving scene, uniting diverse contemporary discourses to sanctify sexual relationships between women.

4

Hall wrote The Well to gain social recognition for a ‘misunderstood and misjudged’ sexual minority. This central ambition of Hall’s, rather than any pornographic depiction or obscene language, brought about its ban. The editor who first attacked it, James Douglas, feared that ‘sexual inversion and perversion [. . .] is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls [. . .] I have seen the plague stalking shamelessly through great social assemblies. I have heard it whispered about by young men and women who cannot grasp its unutterable putrefaction.’ Many of The Well’s defenders argued that the novel is a cautionary tale – Stephen does not prosper, sexual inversion is not shown to be enjoyable. But Douglas was in one sense right – Stephen is an attractive, glamorous and passionate character. When the book reached court, the defence stated that the love between the women characters was treated with restraint, a lack of sensationalism, and ‘reverence’. The magistrate, Chartres Biron, took this defence and made it the keynote of his condemnation. Same-sex sex could be depicted in fiction, he stated, but this could only have a ‘strong moral influence’ if the work presented it as ‘the tragedy of people fighting against horrible instincts’. The Well, in direct contrast, was ‘a plea for existence in which the invert is to be recognized and tolerated, and not treated with condemnation, as they are at present, by all decent people.’ The legal definition of obscenity covered any text liable to ‘deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’ (established by the Hicklin Rule, 1868). Biron argued that The Well’s promotion of tolerance was corrupting, ensuring that The Well of Loneliness was banned in the UK.

The trial and ban, of course, ensured the novel’s notoriety, and the book became an international bestseller, translated into eleven languages. Its readers included those following a fashionable debate, and those seeking pornography. And for the next seven decades, women readers came to this novel seeking rare and vital information on love between women. The remainder of this introduction aims to trace some of the complex relationship between the book, its reader, and her times. As with many famous works, it can be hard to untangle The Well from its influence. We can, for example, discuss the romance of Romeo and Juliet, while knowing that the play has influenced what we find ‘romantic’. Thus when we discuss how The Well handles sexual desire between women, we stand on ground prepared by the novel itself. Changes in society have influenced how readers react to The Well, but at the same time The Well has been one of the factors that have changed society. Modern ideas of what a lesbian is, what she looks like, who and how she desires, have been greatly influenced by this novel. The Well also establishes many of the conventions of the coming-out story.

Women readers in particular have looked to this novel for more than entertainment. It has been expected to provide information on lesbian identity and relationships, and to flesh out dry medical or scientific accounts. Many women readers therefore read it specifically to explore their own sexual identity, trying to find an appropriate name or label for themselves. Women Like Us, a collection of life stories by older lesbians, contains positive recollections from when the novel was first published; these life stories show that the novel encouraged and supported some women in their sexual identities:

Then I read The Well of Loneliness, and this confirmed me in my belief that I was a lesbian. I even went and bought a copy, it was thirty shillings, which was a lot of money in those days. It swept me off my feet. I identified with Stephen Gordon, and I thought it was tragic and I wept buckets and went around in a daze, for days.

[Diana Chapman]

I had an Eton crop and I used to wear a collar and tie . . . We were all dying to get hold of The Well of Loneliness and we passed it around even when it was banned. It was quite dog-eared. We just thought it was wonderful, because we knew we were like that.

[Eleanor]

When you read that, it gave you some identity about what it was you were feeling . . . And that was important, that ‘Gosh!’ For the first time I knew what liking women was, what this feeling you are getting was all about.

[Dorothy Dickson-Wright]

The controversy surrounding the novel, its discussion of sexual identity, and its emotionally charged drama all contribute to its appeal. Many women who felt like Stephen – even looked like Stephen (with tie and Eton crop) – were delighted with their new-found heroine. Many were also delighted by Radclyffe Hall, who was an impeccably tailored, flamboyant, masculine woman. The press played up her appearance; the photo that accompanied Douglas’s attack was cropped at the knees to conceal Hall’s skirt and display her masculine shirt, tie and cigarette. Hall received huge quantities of mail from women, some asking her opinion on when social change would come, others announcing their attraction to her. The novel, and the image of Hall in the press and in public, combined to popularise an image of the mannish lesbian. A topic on which many people were entirely ignorant was made suddenly visible. The lesbian was invented overnight.

Laura Doan (Fashioning Sapphism, 2001) has challenged this version of history, arguing that tailored, androgynous clothing for women was highly fashionable in the period, and wasn’t usually seen as a declaration that the wearer desired other women. Light-hearted cartoons from Punch magazine show bold tailored young women chasing wilting, artistic young men. Doan also points out that Hall was not the most mannishly dressed woman in London – Hall tended to wear a skirt, not trousers, and had her severely cropped hair softened by curls at the side of her ears. None the less, a visible language of masculine dressing, smoking and swaggering became both a source of strength and a means of communication for lesbians over the following decades. It was also, however, in some ways a disadvantage, alienating women who did not see themselves in such terms. Feminine lesbians, and masculine but heterosexual women, are the most obviously exiles from the cult of Stephen Gordon.

It may seem odd that a turn-of-the-century English aristocrat became a representative figure against which women from all social classes and many countries have judged their own identities. But in many cases readers made an imaginative leap over class and historical differences to find some resonant similarity. For example, the writer Donna Allegra is a black working-class lesbian from New York; in The Coming-Out Stories she says succinctly: ‘I’d read Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and said, That’s me. ’ [footnote: The Original Coming-Out Stories, Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope, Crossing Press, 1989]

As the century progressed, however, shifts in the lesbian community affected how The Well was received, and the cracks in Stephen’s sainthood became more visible. In the late 1970s, the vibrant political and social groups of the Women’s Liberation Movement generated a vigorous debate on sex between women. The social and political meaning of lesbian identity was reconsidered. A new wave of women readers believed Stephen’s character to be built on a fundamental misunderstanding. Her attraction to women is seen as the most important feature of her character; she is consistently referred to (in reminiscences, and in criticism) as a lesbian. At the same time, her idealisation of men and her masculine behaviour are consistently underplayed or attacked. Hall may have seen these aspects of Stephen – attraction to women, and masculine identity – as necessarily interconnected, but a new crop of critics divided them. Jane Rule writes with some affection for the novel, but sees Stephen – and through her, Hall – as misdiagnosed. ‘Inversion’ was an invention, existing only because Hall ‘could not imagine a woman who wanted the privilege and power of men unless she was a freak’. Rule argues that time and social change would have liberated Hall and Stephen from their invert identities: ‘though intelligent women are still a threat to some men, no one would see intelligence as a signal for diagnosing inversion. As for the freedom of behavior Stephen craved, there isn’t a woman today who doesn’t prefer trousers and pockets for many activities.’ Rule believes that inversion is feminism, seen through the lens of sexism. Hall needed radicalising, rather than diagnosing.

From this basis, critiques of the novel multiply. The Well champions the attraction of opposites – masculine Stephen is attracted to ‘normal’ feminine women. Lesbian feminists saw this as forcing lesbian relationships to follow heterosexual behaviour patterns. They proposed that women could be attracted through their similarity and shared experiences. Lesbian feminism also saw women’s sexual attraction as an extension of feminism. Although The Well’s ‘normal’ women characters have many virtues, and show pluck and loyalty, Hall is not so much a feminist as an advocate of the ‘special case’ of the invert. Although her literary agent was a woman, Hall detested negotiating the American edition of The Well with a woman publisher: ‘I find it both difficult and tedious to deal with a woman . . . in many cases it is better for women to keep out of business negotiations’ (letter to Carl Brandt).

Finally, many lesbian feminists wanted to break down injustices in the social system, overcoming not only sexism but also class and race oppression. The Well, with its landed aristocrats, willing servants and ‘slowly evolving’ black entertainers, is in many ways deeply conservative. Hall’s life provides many examples of intolerant or bigoted behaviour; she and Una were enthusiasts of Italian fascism and made anti-Semitic comments. A letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1912 shows Hall’s traditional views overriding her sympathies for the Votes for Women campaign: ‘Have the Suffragettes no spark of patriotism left . . . Since when have English ladies regulated their conduct by that of the working classes?’ Liberation, for Stephen, would be the chance to bring her feminine bride home to Morton and take up her rightful position as Lord of the Manor, not the abolition of class privilege.

Many lesbian coming-out stories written in the 1970s and 1980s record their objections to The Well which gives readers false information, and even prevents them from seeing themselves as ‘real’ lesbians; short, feminine, plump or unathletic women all feel they fail to fit the mould. For example, Elizabeth W. Knowlton, in The Coming-Out Stories, starts her own story by rejecting The Well: ‘I do not happen to be six feet tall, do not have broad shoulders and narrow hips (à la Well of Loneliness) do not enjoy participating in sports.’ Critics were equally displeased, regretting a missed opportunity – so much fame for such an inappropriate book. Catharine Stimpson placed it in a tradition of the lesbian Bildungsroman. She admired those novels that follow a path of ‘enabling escape’, whereby the lesbian characters fight against social stigma, whereas The Well was a ‘narrative of damnation’, showing the lesbian overwhelmed by society. Lilian Faderman, the feminist historian, saw the novel as slavishly following sexology -– which she sees, in turn, as a project to undermine Victorian feminism. Sexologists described women’s desires to work, to vote, to study as a congenital abnormality in order to keep women disempowered.

So through the decades, The Well fell in and out of popularity. It functions as a kind of barometer; one can see, by reactions to it, how desire between women is currently being understood. Since the 1990s, queer women’s communities have been experiencing something of a renaissance of gender diversity. Drag kings (women performing masculine roles), butch women and transgendered people have been increasingly visible in queer women’s magazines, fiction, films and clubs. Research emphasising, rather than downplaying, the histories of masculine, crossdressing and ‘passing’ women has grown in popularity. Jay Prosser and Judith Halberstam, writing separately in 1998, argue that The Well has been seen as a deeply unsatisfactory lesbian novel because it is not a lesbian novel at all. Returning to the sexological idea of the ‘invert’, Prosser points out that invert identity has much more in common with our modern ideas of transsexual identity than with lesbian identity. It is not the case that Stephen identifies with her father, and men, because internalised homophobia makes her think this is how lesbians should behave; rather, she identifies with men, and loves woman as a facet of that identification.

Compared with modern transsexual autobiography, there are some features that raise questions. Stephen never attempts to ‘pass’ as a man, not even for brief intervals. The writer Vita Sackville-West ‘passed’ as a wounded solider during the First World War to go dancing with Violet Trefusis. She bandaged her head to disguise her hair, and to explain her presence when most young men had been called up. Colonel Barker, who had lived and married as a man, was tried and imprisoned in April 1929 (a year after The Well was published). Hall viciously dismissed Barker as ‘a mad pervert of the most undesirable type, with her mock war medals’, and said she ‘would like to see her [Barker] drawn and quartered’. Barker’s deception about his/her military service was presumably an offence to Hall’s sense of honour, as was Barker‘s desertion of his/her wife, but it is ambiguous whether this ‘pervert’ also offended Hall just by ‘passing’. None of the other inverted women in the novel deliberately ‘pass’ as men, although Wanda may have attempted it and failed: ‘If she dressed like a woman she looked like a man, and if she dressed like a man she looked like a woman!’ (p. 319).

The novel’s handful of explanatory discourses – sexology, theology and social protest – shows the broad spread of meanings given to sexuality and gender in the 1920s. The readings and re-readings of Stephen – as invert, lesbian, transsexual – show the continued evolution of sex and gender definitions throughout the twentieth century. A reader seeking to find her own feelings, identity or behaviour mirrored in a novel, therefore, is always undertaking a perilous activity. A successful moment of empathy with a fictional character might sweep you off your feet, and put you in a daze, for days. It might show how the unthinkable can be thought, and acted upon. But if the reader’s attempts are thwarted, it can bring feelings of exclusion, alienation and anger. The Well arises from a particular cultural moment, through the vision of one polemical writer. As such, not every reader will recognise themselves in Stephen. The Well of Loneliness has been sustained, but also almost submerged, by readers attempting either to fit into it, or to make it fit their own requirements. The Well should continue to delight new readers, and to struggle with them, but as a puzzling and emotionally captivating story, not as a ‘lesbian bible’.

Esther Saxey

Bibliography

Brittain, Vera, Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity?, Femina, 1968: contains criticism by Brittain of the novel and of the ban, and some newspaper reports from the aftermath of the ban in the UK.

Faderman, Lilian, Surpassing the Love of Men, The Women’s Press, London, 1985: contains a negative assessment of the novel’s impact on feminists in the 1920s, and discusses the influence of sexology on New Women (focused on in the chapter ‘The Spread of Medical Knowledge ’).

Frank, Claudia Stillman, Beyond The Well of Loneliness: The Fiction of Radclyffe Hall, Avebury, 1982: an overview of Hall’s writing, placing The Well in the context of her other novels.

Prosser, Jay and Doan,Laura, Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001: this anthology contains the attack by James Douglas in the Sunday Express, the magistrate’s verdict and contemporary reviews of The Well. It also has a range of critical responses from the following decades. These include Jane Rule (writing in 1975), and Judith Halberstam and Jay Prosser’s recent transgender readings.

Rourke, Rebecca O., Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness, Routledge, New York, 1989: the first half of this volume focuses on the character of Stephen, and the second contains responses to a reader survey on the novel: how readers obtained it, their initial reactions and their feelings on re-reading it.

Documentation from the trial of The Well in the National Archives has been officially released to public view, and some images of original documents can be accessed:

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/releases/2005/january2/

Biographies of Radclyffe Hall

Troubridge, Una, Lady, The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall, Hammond and Hammond, London, 1961: written in 1945, but not published until 1961, this is Hall’s first biography, an intimate but rambling work by Hall’s partner.

Dickson, Lovat, Radclyffe Hall at The Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle, Collins, London, 1975: a slightly salacious but noteworthy biography.

Three modern biographies of Hall, drawing on diaries, letters and official documentation:

Baker, Michael, Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1985

Cline, Sally, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John, Overlook Press, 1999

Souhami, Diana, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1998

The Well of Loneliness

Author’s Note

All the characters in this book are purely imaginary, and if the author in any instance has used names that may suggest a reference to living persons, she has done so inadvertently.

A motor-ambulance unit of British women drivers did very fine service upon the Allied front in France during the later months of the war, but although the unit mentioned in this book, of which Stephen Gordon becomes a member, operates in much the same area, it has never had any existence save in the author’s imagination.

Dedicated to our three selves

Book One

Chapter 1

1

Not very far from Upton-on-Severn [1] – between it, in fact, and the Malvern Hills [2] – stands the country seat of the Gordons of Bramley; well timbered, well cottaged, well fenced and well watered, having, in this latter respect, a stream that forks in exactly the right position to feed two large lakes in the grounds.

The house itself is of Georgian red brick, with charming circular windows near the roof. It has dignity and pride without ostentation, self-assurance without arrogance, repose without inertia; and a gentle aloofness that, to those who know its spirit, but adds to its value as a home. It is indeed like certain lovely women who, now old, belong to a bygone generation – women who in youth were passionate but seemly; difficult to win but when won, all-fulfilling. They are passing away, but their homesteads remain, and such an homestead is Morton.

To Morton Hall came the Lady Anna Gordon as a bride of just over twenty. She was lovely as only an Irish woman can be, having that in her bearing that betokened quiet pride, having that in her eyes that betokened great longing, having that in her body that betokened happy promise – the archetype of the very perfect woman, whom creating God has found good. Sir Philip had met her away in County Clare – Anna Molloy, the slim virgin thing, all chastity, and his weariness had flown to her bosom as a spent bird will fly to its nest – as indeed such a bird had once flown to her, she told him, taking refuge from the perils of a

Reviews for The Well of Loneliness

[aarch235 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Awful, dull, self-indulgent. Couldn't finish it.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of those seminal (no pun intended) novels which gets harder to read when the original shock value has long worn off. I'm sure Radclyffe Hall's open and emotional account of 'inverts', or lesbians, in Edwardian England and post-war Paris was controversial enough to warrant the furore raised at the time of publication - an obscenity trial which lead to the book being banned in the UK - but now Loneliness is just a weakly written historical account of prejudice and persecution - interesting, important but lacking in inspiration.Don't get me wrong, for the first half of the book, all I could think was 'Yes! I'm going to change my name to Stephen, this woman is telling my story!' - which I suppose is a good thing, 90 years on - but then the purple prose kicked in. Now, I have read every last one of Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel novels, which was like Enid Blyton writing for Mills and Boon, but at least her characters were interesting. Stephen - yes, of course giving the female protagonist a male name instantly turns her into a pseudo-man - suffers for her 'unnatural' love, but she is so dreadfully upper class, I couldn't bring myself to care. I was more concerned about her horse. And Mary is a drip. I did like the acid-tongued Brockett, though.I'm sorry, I know I should revere this novel far more than I do, and I'm sure reading this drivel gave a lot of confused and closeted women the strength to be themselves, but the writing is so stodgy. There's a lot going on - gay love affairs, World War One, 'Gay Paree' - but there is also much heavy prose, caricatures and general racism, which I don't normally complain about in nineteenth/early twentieth century texts, but there are a couple of cringe-inducing examples.'For sooner the world came to realise that fine brains very frequently went with inversion, the sooner it would have to withdraw its ban, and the sooner would cease this persecution.'

[mahallett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

i didn't expect to like this as much as i did. stephen is an odd character but interesting. i felt for her. she doesn't understand the world very well. we are all lonely really. i don't think modern lesbians should be offended. perhaps they were offended because there wasn't enough sex to be "true".

[amerynth · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" is one of those books that I can appreciate for its history, rather than its literary quality. One of the first books about lesbianism, it was banned and suppressed in both England and America for its frank portrayal of a woman who struggled with her sexuality all of her life. The novel follows the life of a woman named Stephen -- who was given her name by parents who expected a boy. Instead they had a girl who appreciated abilities that were considered masculine in that time-- athleticism, fencing and hunting. She grows into a young woman who struggles with accepting herself when those around her, including an unsympathetic mother, do not. That struggle continues even to the end of the book, which draws to a rather dissatisfying conclusion.As a literary work, this book isn't particularly appealing. Hall has a tendency to go on and on about events that don't really shed light on any of her characters. Many of them are very two-dimensional, particularly Anna, Stephen's mother. While I didn't really enjoy the book (and in fact struggled in finding the will to finish it,) I'm glad I read it because it illustrates so well the pain and heartache that come in a world without acceptance.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't know what to think of The Well of Loneliness. I read it because it's a lesbian classic, and someone said that it was one of the first novels where horrible things don't have to happen to its lesbian protagonists. I can't actually imagine anything more agonising than what the protagonist, Stephen, does -- voluntarily giving up her lover to a male close friend to give her safety and security, acting as a martyr for her... And Barbara and Jamie: both of them die because of the life they lead, the way they have to live to be together. No, I can't say it's true that terrible things don't happen to the protagonists because of their sexualities.

On the other hand, their sexualities are presented as a part of them: not a choice, but something irrevocably stamped into them from birth. The last lines are a plea to God to allow 'inverts' their existence. So there is that hope in it.

It's sentimental, overwritten, melodramatic. It's stereotypical. But yet I'm glad I read it, and yes, it made me feel -- feel for the lives of those such as Radclyffe Hall and her characters, who couldn't imagine the kind of life I and others lead today. Yes, it's worth a read, and yes, I'm going to keep my copy.

[anderlawlor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this and Rubyfruit Jungle the same weekend. I was 14 and I'd bought them sleathily from the "feminist" bookstore on Chapel Street in New Haven. (I wish I could remember the name of that bookstore. The Golden Something.) And Rubyfruit Jungle seemed like the world that was possible but The Well of Loneliness was a world I could only dream about. I guess I'm due to re-read it. I re-read it as an undergraduate and thought clever queer-studies thoughts about it, but I've forgotten all that now and I just remember being a teenager dreaming about changing my name to Stephen and being British.

[ganeshaka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In short, Judy the Obscure - that is to say, Radclyffe Hall eloquently excruciatingly explicates the sorrows of Stephen Gordon, a gender dysphoric Edwardian woman, with an ultimate spin as inevitable and crushing a downer as what Thomas Hardy did for his sad and unlucky in love stone mason.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were ... And the vilest of them could point a finger of scorn at her, and be loudly applauded." (p. 256)Published in 1928, The Well of Loneliness dealt openly with the subject of homosexuality, at a time when it was far from well-understood, and never discussed, by "polite society." It is a searingly painful account of a young woman's coming of age and her search for love and acceptance. Her parents longed for a son, referred to her in utero as "Stephen," and then in fact baptised her as Stephen. She grew up "not like other girls," and with few friends in her community. Only a couple of people understood the situation: her father, who had read some of the research of the day, and a governess who was herself a lesbian. But they maintained their silence; Stephen's father did not even confide in her mother, and no one explained things to Stephen.Stephen began discovering her own sexuality as she approached adulthood, through relationships with a male friend and a married woman. Later, she became part of a circle of "like" friends, and was in a committed relationship with another woman. Yet her life was not a happy one. Her mannish appearance attracted a lot of attention and gossip, she could never be "out" in public, and her relationships would never be formally recognized in the church or in the courts. She became estranged from her mother, who could not accept Stephen as she was. This is not a happy story, but Radclyffe Hall so expertly draws the reader into Stephen's life, love, and anguish, that this book is difficult to put down. What struck me most profoundly in this novel is both how far we've come, and how far we haven't, in societal views toward gays and lesbians. On the one hand, today most people know someone who is gay, and gays themselves can find community. Some are also comfortable being open about their sexuality. None of this was possible in 1928. On the other hand, Radclyffe Hall vociferously argued that homosexuality was innate, not a choice, a subject some people still debate. And, gay and lesbian relationships are still not properly recognized in many states and countries, and in many religious denominations.Because of its controversial subject matter, The Well of Loneliness was banned in Britain for 20 years after its publication. I read it in honor of Banned Books Week, and I'm glad I did.

[echo2_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Her heart grew more grateful with every mile, for hers was above all a grateful nature. (250)

[bhowell_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book when I was 25 and again when I turned fifty. It remains a classic and is achingly sad, a story of heartbreak and loneliness.

[emily.d · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating book. When I started it I thought it was going to read as a fictional autobiography - and it sort of did, though it turned out in the end more like a five hundred page long character study. The last fifty or so pages were heartbreaking, and the tragic conclusion was inevitable, and beautiful in a sad sort of way. I started this book for my school English Literature project - as a book to compare with Tipping The Velvet. More than any other LGBT book I've read (though admittedly I'm only on about number twenty) Stephen's internal conflicts and struggles were perfectly transcribed and inspired an enormous amount of sympathy in me. More than I had thought it would do, it enabled me to get past how outdated this book is in its treatment of 'inversion'. As a product of the early twentieth century, Radclyffe Hall is over-apologetic about her characters' sexualities and reduces Brockett (the only gay male character in the book) to a meaningless stereotype that the book could really do without. Despite this, no one could read about Stephen watching Mary leave, or the deaths of Jamie and Barbara, and say that the book presents lesbianism as anything other than a natural and valid way of living a life. Having read it now, rather than just read about it, the obscenity trial and controversy that originally surrounded it seem barbaric. Even when people read it, it was actually condemned for its portrayal of homosexuality when it should have been able to open up people's minds to be more accepting.

[ocgreg34 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Anna and Sir Phillip Gordon looked happily unpon the upcoming birth of their child, hoping against hope to have a boy, even going so far as to only pick out a boy's name. When the child arrives, Anna is dispirited when she gives birth to a girl. Sir Phillip makes the most of it, but still decides to give her the name they'd already chosen: Stephen. And so enters into the world one of the most astonishing creatures of literary fiction. Young Stephen knows that she's different from the other children, but her father, noticing her difference also, allows her to grow up her own way: riding horses like a young man, sometimes dressing like a young boy. From a young age to her lae thirties, we watch as Stephen discovers herself, longing to love and to fit into a society that will not accept her or others like her. She puts her feelings into words, becoming a successful author and does find love, but that love is put to the test when someone who can offer her beloved acceptance steps into the picture. An astonishing book for its time that was banned upon initial publication, openly discussing what was considered taboo with much candor and respect. The characters of Radclyffe Hall's novel deal with the same societal pressures and beliefs which are still prevalent today: same-sex marriage, societal roles of male and female, wanting to fight for one's country during a time of war even when that country doesn't want you because of who you are. A truly remarkbale novel.

[rainpebble_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amongst so many negative reviews, I will stand and say that I loved this book. The lesbianism in it is not written overtly enough so as to be offensive. I found it to be very sensitively written and a very thoughtful read.I cared about the characters that I should have and despised those that were to there to be despised. I am very taken with Hall's writing and looking forward to reading more of her work. I am very glad that I read Radclyffe Hall's bio before reading this book. I think it brought me more in tune with her writing.There is some happiness in the story and a great deal of sadness as well. I am certain that I will be reading this one again. I gave it 4 1/2 stars.

[misskittystryker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Well of Loneliness" was just one of those books I had to have, because it's iconic. Sad, certainly, in points, but also really takes one back to a time where being a lesbian was really an option only for the privileged.

[doc_illusion · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The book that wouldn't end. It's one redeeming virtue is that the last page is beautifully written.

[afinpassing · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A mostly martyred and sadistic treatment of "inversion" circa 1928 Britain, which alternates between passionate cries for equality and recognition as natural on one hand and on the other abased self-denial and reaffirmation of "the perfect thing" that is heteronormative love, raising children, and a sense of belonging to society. In tone, too, it varies wildly from prosaic to embarrassingly romantic and pagan to brutally intense (the last chapter is, while sort of ridiculous ...more A mostly martyred and sadistic treatment of "inversion" circa 1928 Britain, which alternates between passionate cries for equality and recognition as natural on one hand and on the other abased self-denial and reaffirmation of "the perfect thing" that is heteronormative love, raising children, and a sense of belonging to society. In tone, too, it varies wildly from prosaic to embarrassingly romantic and pagan to brutally intense (the last chapter is, while sort of ridiculous in substance, unusually successful in this).An important landmark for lesbian literature and a fascinatingly grotesque exercise in self-perception, but not a very good novel at all. Following nearly forty years of a life from birth to final tragedy, Stephen Gordon is described sometimes in excruciating, pointless detail; at others, major events breeze past with little consideration. The supporting players are mostly stock figures, and perhaps read more so today than when it was published as all the gay and lesbian stereotypes have played out through decades of cultural output, but none have much to contribute besides a definite articulated viewpoint and position counter to our heroine, and are dropped and brought up again with no elegance. That is the major problem with all aspects of the story: everything is definitely articulated and inelegant, and the epic length makes it so tiresome weeks went by without wanting to take it up (then again, there were days of compulsive, delighted reading, too) -- and Hall relies on a number of recurring favored turns of phrase that grow increasingly stilted and oppressive.Where it isn't bland it is almost relentlessly bleak, but, as far as it goes, for that it makes a useful study in gay life and identity in the early part of the 20th century. One only wishes for more -- or at least more style where it does find its purpose.

[mirrordrum · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

the best thing i can say about 'well' is that it inspired Mary Renault, who read it while on vacation in France with her partner, to write "Middle Mist" (published in the US as "the friendly young ladies") as a retort.

[sheherazahde · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A classic about being a lesbian in the bad old days.

[msnikki · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Starts slow, but the foundation needed to be set. Once it gets going the story hooks you. Stephen's turmoil is heartbreaking, but I'm not convinced it rings true. The ending is odd, but I still recommend it highly. The description of the Paris social scene is gripping, especially when juxtapsed with periods of religious and romantic passion.

[sharonbt-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel moved me very much when I first read it, around the time this edition was published - 1968. I had heard of it for years, but finally was able to buy a copy. The plot has been summarised by many other reviewers and I find myself agreeing with a lot of the criticisms of it now - its negativity, Stephen Gordon as martyr, class snobbery and racism, etc - but I believe it should be appreciated as a work of its time. No, Radclyffe Hall was not a great writer, but she was a successful "middlebrow" novelist who had won a couple of literary awards and earned a respectable place among novelists of the twenties. I don't believe she realised quite what the publication of The Well would cost her - she may have hoped to cause a stir, but I doubt she'd have wanted the book banned. What gives the book its power - power to still affect us today? I find it hard to account for this, or the effect it had on me. The sympathetic portrait of Stephen - who would make an honourable, law-abiding, God-fearing and attractive English gentleman, except that she was born a woman - goes part of the way, so that her awful fate can tug at the heartstrings. The total rejection by her mother, the cowardly refusal to "explain" her to herself by her father and the disgraceful treatment of her by the bored, unhappily married Angela Crossby seem more unfair when contrasted with Stephen's good character. And the surrendering of Mary Llewellyn to Martin Hallam means that Stephen effectively loses a good friend, as well as her lover. In fact, you wonder what on earth will happen to Stephen in the future - will she ever love again? And will she ever write another novel?One of the most interesting characters in The Well is Valerie Seymour, supposedly modelled on American expat, Nathalie Clifford Barney, who held regular literary "salons" in Paris. Valerie is a sane and rational breath of fresh air in the novel, who cannot understand Stephen's decision to sacrifice her own happiness. "You were made for a martyr", she scolds her. But she does allow Stephen to "use" her - pretending they were having an affair - to drive Mary into Martin's arms. I guess if Radclyffe Hall had a major strength, it lay in her portrayal of characters. She seems to invent a character and really go to bat for them. This characterises other works, too - notably The Sixth Beatitude and the short story, "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself". I haven't read Adam's Breed, but I've no doubt I'd find myself sympathising with its protagonist, too.In all, I can actually see myself re-reading The Well of Loneliness again some day.

[atreic · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are lots of reasons not to like 'the first lesbian novel'. The take home message of 'she knew her girlfriend would be better with a Real Man, who could marry her and give her babies, so she lied to make her leave her' is never going to win over all the audience. And it is of its time, with all the implicit racism and classism you'd expect.That out of the way, I adore this book. There is something about it that just sings true to me - what it says about love, and the beauty of the world, and how people cope with being different. A book that manages to capture how terribly cruel and awful the world can be to people, and yet also captures moments of pure joy, and about how the honourable person continues in the world we are in.

[chris.wolak · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book for a graduate reading list that I put together on lesbian novels. It was a fascinating read, historically, but on an emotional level it s devastating. I've often thought about re-reading it, but need to wait for a few sunny days on the beach when I'm in a splendid mood.

[Joanna Folk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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[helenliz_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A couple of notes: I understand this book is historically important - that doesn't mean it is very good or has aged very well. And I have to get this off my chest right away. My edition was 496 pages long and throughout that entire time not one person comments, "Stephen, huh, that's an odd name for a girl". NOT ONE! I understand why she's called Stephen (father convinced the cild was going to be a boy, so she gets the boys name they'd picked out) but for not one person to even make passing reference to it throughout the remainder of the book is just entirely unrealistic. So what to make of the book itself. Well it's all very overblown and flowery. At times it disappears into a religious strain that to the modern reader is redundant and self indulgent. It is of its time. I also thought that this was going to go down the nature vs nurture debate. The first part of the book sets this up: the girl born instead of the wanted son, such that she is given a boy's name and brought up more like a boy - being allowed to ride astride, for instance. But the text itself, at every oportunity, is insistant that inverts (to use the language of the time) are born. That they can;t be unnatural, as society would have it, because they are born that way. And then God gets dragged in again and you go round the loop again. It's one I have no intention of revisiting, although I am able to admire its bravery while not having enjoyed it very much at all.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was first published in 1928. It tells about the life of Englishwoman, Stephen Gordon, born to an upper-class family, but a disappointment to her parents as she wasn't the expected boy. From an early age, it was apparent that she was a lesbian. Her father recognized this and tried to help her and guide her but he fell short of actually explaining to her what her sexual identity meant, leaving her confused and uncertain. Her mother knew her daughter was different and that this difference made her unlovable to her, yet she failed to recognize or acknowledge or what that difference was. I found this an incredibly sad story as she faced manipulation, ridicule and scorn all of her life. It is all too easy to forget how not following the 'norm' in sexual identity was treated not all that long ago. My heart goes out to people who have had to struggle to find their place in the world and be accepted for their true nature. This book has been banned on and off again over the years, but for quite some time it was one of the main books about being lesbian and as such was the guidebook for many a young girl. I can't say that I particularly enjoyed this story of gender identity but I can understand it's importance. Believed to be auto-biographical, The Well of Loneliness is a slow and thoughtful, non-explicit story about wanting love and acceptance but mostly finding despair and loneliness.

[blackrabbit89 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Boy, was this book a product of its time. The title is spot-on in describing the mood of this novel. The Well of Loneliness is a thinly veiled account of the author’s own life as a lesbian in the 1920s and earlier, and it was very depressing.Don’t get me wrong; I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time, and I’m very glad to have read it and experienced it. But I struggled through it. It was draining.The main character, a lesbian named Stephen, grows up feeling very different from everyone around her, although she doesn’t have a name for this difference. She begins an affair with a married woman who abandons her, and eventually she falls in love with a woman she met during WWI. The entire book paints lesbians and gay men as social outcasts, sexual deviants, freaks of nature–which is how society viewed them at that time. Stephen is hyperaware of just how extremely heavy the burden of her “deviant sexuality” is. She is rejected by her mother and by others in her life, she struggles to find friends and to create a social life, and eventually she tricks her lover into ending their relationship with the hope that her lover will marry a man and thus be saved from the difficult life of a lesbian.This book was immediately banned in many places when it was published, and it almost ended Radclyffe Hall’s career. I think she is remarkably brave for having written it, and I think it does inspire sympathy and increase understanding of the burden that society placed on gay people back then. (One minor lesbian character committed suicide; another struggled with immense guilt because of religious oppression.)Although I would have loved to see Stephen take joy in her sexual orientation, that is perhaps not realistic for its time. Stephen did the best she could in an extremely oppressive society, even maintaining faith in God despite the way the world treated her.