Books by and for independent women

Banned Books: The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

Featuring on the Banned Books list, The Well Of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was published in 1928 and subsequently banned. It is regarded as a landmark lesbian novel.

“I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.”  Well, James Douglas who was editor of The Sunday Express at the time clearly wasn’t a fan.

The novel tells of the life of Stephen, an ‘invert’ (Radclyffe Hall took inspiration from sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing who regarded homosexuality as an inborn trait, a sexual inversion). Stephen is born to an upper class family and from birth feels much more like her father than her mother – critics have since reflected that this book is about transgenderism. After being spurned by a married woman, Stephen finds a book – thought to be Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis – and comes to understand that she is an invert.  Stephen writes a novel and moves to Paris, experiencing the underground gay scene for the first time.

James Douglas felt the portrayal of the life of ‘inverts’ was a potentially corrupting influence, propagandising a way of life that was both unnatural and immoral. Thanks to opinions like this, the book was banned in the UK and subject to obscenity trials both here and in the US. Publication and distribution continued in France, and when the book became widely available again, thousands of copies were sold. Whether this book would have stood the test of time if it hadn’t have been banned is another question. In an article for The Sunday Times, Jeanette Winterson expresses horror at the description of The Well of Loneliness as the “bible of lesbianism.” She lays into Hall’s clumsy prose and lack of humour, and unrepresentative depiction of lesbian relationships, defending instead the beauty and imagination in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando . And who can blame her? Jeanette Winterson has written some of the most beautiful prose captured in print (I defy anyone to read ‘Written On The Body’ and not want to savour every single word over and over again) and has given the literary world lyrical, raw and truthful portrayals of lesbian relationships.

Hall’s lack of literary skill aside, The Well of Loneliness was undeniably a landmark publication, forcing discussion about the portrayal of sexuality in literature and bringing debates about homosexuality to the public arena (many notable writers spoke out in defense of the book in the US including Ernest Hemingway and Edna St. Vincent Millay). Winterson argues that the banning of the book condemned a generation of young women to “a societal reading of themselves as man-mimicking misfits,” but the book paved the way for art and literature that progressed the idea of homosexuality beyond psychoanalysis, ‘inversion’ and questions of moral corruption – the legacy of the book and the trials are perhaps more important than the book itself. 

“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.” - Radclyffe Hall

Post by Alex Herod