16 November

Britain’s pioneer lesbian novel is judged obscene

1928 (Marguerite) Radclyffe Hall (1883–1943), author of the first English novel to deal explicitly with lesbianism, was already notorious when The Well of Loneliness came to trial in November 1928. She dressed in an ostentatiously male style, insisted on being addressed as ‘John’, wore a monocle, smoked in public, and made no secret of her sexual preferences.

Hall – who started fiction late, in 1924 – had written four novels before The Well of Loneliness. That immediately previous, Adam’s Breed (1926), was intermittently autobiographical. So too (with a lot of wish-fulfilling romanticism) was The Well of Loneliness – with the difference that Hall took the plunge and made the heroine, ‘Stephen’ Gordon, female.

Stephen is the only child of Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon, who desperately wanted a son. The novel implies that their excessive desire for a male heir has tainted the foetus. Stephen is born with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and the invert’s tendency to neurasthenia.

The Gordons have a magnificent estate, Morton Hall in Worcestershire. Stephen has an idyllic childhood (Hall’s was actually rather pinched, and passed in unlovely places like Bournemouth). She grows up loving horses, cultivating her biceps with dumb-bells, and falling in love with the female servants.

Sir Philip is killed by a falling cedar tree, his last words a desperate attempt to warn his wife about Stephen, who subsequently falls in love with the wife of a local businessman, Angela Crossby. Angela, to save herself, betrays Stephen, who is denounced by the infuriated husband as ‘a sin against creation’. She is cast out by her mother with only a faithful housekeeper, ‘Puddle’, and the fortune her father has thoughtfully left her for just such an emergency.

Stephen becomes a novelist, and resides in Paris with her ‘kind’. On the outbreak of war, Stephen serves in an all-woman ambulance unit. Here she meets the great love of her life, Mary Llewellyn, a sweet, simple girl from the Welsh valleys. In Italy, after the war, they consummate their love (‘that night they were not divided’). Stephen eventually realises that the degenerate life of the lesbian will corrupt her lover, and forces her to leave. The novel ends with the hero(ine) Stephen and her lament: ‘Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence.’

The Well of Loneliness promulgates Havelock Ellis’s (since discredited) view, expressed in Sexual Inversion (1897), that lesbians are males trapped in female bodies. The first edition of the novel was published by Jonathan Cape, with an afterword by Ellis, on 27 July 1928.

On 19 August, the Sunday Express’s editor, James Douglas, attacked the novel (‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid’) and demanded that it be prosecuted. A moral panic ensued, with virtually all the British press joining in. The novel’s publishers, Jonathan Cape, lost their nerve and dispatched stereo plates to Paris, so that The Well of Loneliness could be published there, under the imprint of their subsidiary Pegasus Press.

The home secretary was reassured that no further copies were printed in England. In America, Knopf also withdrew the novel – Alfred Knopf’s wife, Blanche, was influential in the suppression. Despite Cape’s craven unwillingness to offend, imported copies from Paris were seized by HM Customs, and a magistrate’s prosecution ensued in November 1928.

Radclyffe Hall was a Conservative, a Catholic, and at best a mawkishly middlebrow author. Nonetheless, sections of the literary establishment (including Bloomsbury) supported her. Inevitably the book was found to be obscene under the terms of the 1857 (‘tends to deprave and corrupt’) legal criterion, and the distributors fined. The Well of Loneliness remained unpublishable in Britain or America until after the liberating 1959–60 Lady Chatterley trials (see 10 November).