the well of loneliness by radclyffe hall

What was novel in this case was that the book was judged obscene and suppressed not for any particular explicit content but for “the subject itself” and for the fact, according to magistrate Biron, that it was well written and thus constituted a ”palatable The Well of Loneliness was of course not the only book depicting homosexual love and relationships to be put on trial around this time The Hinkley test to rule that the book had the potential to ‘deprave and corrupt’ and ordered the book destroyed. The controversy manufactured by Douglas led to an obscenity trial in November 1928, in which magistrate Sir Chartres Biron upheld

Women, the novel was seized upon by the then editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, as “an intolerable outrage”. Published during a period in which the British parliament debated introducing legislation to outlaw sexual relationships between The context in which the novel appeared is important to consider. Its protagonist is a female lesbian character, Stephen Gordon, and the plot follows her intimate encounters and relationships, which present the lesbian characters’ “inversion” – a contemporary term that Hall appropriated in her writing – as biologically-driven, and depict a complex picture of what life for lesbian women in interwar Britain could be like, setting experiences of personal, intimate happiness alongside wider social ostracism and rejection.

A novel, The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyff (John) Hall, was first published by Jonathan Cape in an initially short print run in 1928.

The well of loneliness by radclyffe hall