Quell der Einsamkeit

The Well of Loneliness is a banned lesbian novel by English author Radclyffe Hall. Written in part to popularize the ideas of sexologists who saw homosexuality as inborn, it follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" is apparent from an early age. As a child she hates dresses and develops a crush on a housemaid; as an adult she wears tailored clothes and neckties and becomes estranged from her mother after her failed affair with a former music-hall actress is exposed. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while both are serving as ambulance drivers in World War I, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as having a debilitating effect on inverts. The novel portrays inversion as a God-given state and ends with a plea for greater tolerance and understanding.

After its publication in 1928, The Well became the target of a campaign by the editor of the Sunday Express newspaper, who wrote "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." Although its only sex scene consists of the words "and that night, they were not divided", a British court judged it obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women". It was not republished until 1949. In the United States the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in U.S. Customs Court and has been in print continuously ever since.

Publicity over The Well's legal battles increased the visibility of lesbians in British and American culture. The character of Stephen Gordon, combined with the wide circulation of photographs of Hall herself, served to fix the image of lesbians as "mannish" or cross-dressed women in the public mind. For decades after its publication, it was the best known lesbian novel in English and often the only source of information that young lesbians had access to. Some lesbians have valued it, while others have criticized it for its tormented tone and for promulgating the idea that lesbians are masculine. In recent years some critics have argued that Stephen Gordon is not a lesbian but a transsexual. Although few critics rate it highly as a work of literature, it continues to provoke intense critical study and debate.

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 bestseller; it would soon win the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize. She had long thought of writing a novel about homosexuality, or as she called it, sexual inversion; now, she believed, her literary reputation would allow such a work to be given a hearing. Since she knew she was risking personal 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 greater tolerance and 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 wrote to her editor at Cassell to say 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."

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 boy's name they had already chosen. Even at birth she is physically unusual — a "narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby" (13). As a girl 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 mother, Lady Anna, is distant, disturbed by Stephen's resemblance to her husband, and "hat[ing] a certain largeness about her, a certain crude lack of grace in her movements" (16). Stephen's father, Sir Phillip, dotes on her and 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. At eighteen, Stephen forms a close friendship with a Canadian man, Martin Hallam, but is horrified when he declares his love for her. Martin leaves for Canada. 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 (118).

Stephen begins to dress in masculine, tailor-made clothes. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbor, Ralph Crossby, whose view of Stephen is "that sort of thing wants putting down at birth" (151). Angela uses Stephen as an "anodyne against boredom", allowing her "a few rather schoolgirlish kisses". Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Angela, fearing exposure, shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends it to Stephen's mother. Lady Anna confronts Stephen, denouncing her 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" (201). 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 because "You need life, you need people." (232) 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 isolated and lonely when Stephen returns to writing. Rejected by polite society, Mary throws herself into Parisian nightlife, seeking "friends to whom we're not moral lepers" (376). Stephen believes Mary is becoming hardened and embittered and feels powerless to provide her with "a more complete and normal existence" (379).

Martin Hallam 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 in order to drive her into Martin's arms. The novel ends with Stephen's plea to God: "Give us also the right to our existence!" (437)

Autobiographical and other sources

Although some writers in the 1970s and 80s treated The Well of Loneliness as a thinly veiled autobiography, there are many differences between the novel and Hall's life. Stephen has a close relationship with her admirable father; Hall barely knew her father, an irresponsible playboy who left the family when she was only a few weeks old. Stephen's mother Lady Anna is reserved, proper, and emotionally distant; although Hall's mother also rejected her daughter, she had a violent temper. Even Stephen's deep attachment to her family home differs sharply from Hall's assessment of the house where she was born, which "had neither dignity nor repose and moreover was deplorably lacking in beauty". Angela Crossby may be a composite of various women with whom Hall had casual affairs in her youth, but Mary, whose lack of outside interests leaves her idle when Stephen is working (340), does not resemble Hall's partner Una Troubridge, an accomplished sculptor who translated Colette's novels into English. Hall said she drew on herself only for the "fundamental emotions that are characteristic of the inverted".

World War I

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Ambulances of the Hackett Lowther Unit

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 Hackett Lowther unit, 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; in later years she claimed the character of Stephen was based on her.

In The Well of Loneliness, war work provides a publicly acceptable role for inverted women (271). The narrative voice asks that their contributions not be forgotten and predicts that they will not go back into hiding again: "A battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded" (272). This martial metaphor continues later in the novel when inverts in postwar Paris are repeatedly referred to as a "miserable army" (387). 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" (271).

Paris lesbian and gay subculture

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Stephen and Brockett visit Marie Antoinette's Temple of Love, near the Petit Trianon, Versailles.

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. When Stephen first travels there, at the urging of her friend Jonathan Brockett — who may be based on Noel Coward — she has not yet spoken about her inversion to anyone. Brockett, acting as tour guide, takes her to the Palace of Versailles, where he tries to draw her out by making coded references to Marie Antoinette and her companion the Princesse de Lamballe. Rumors that the two were lovers had made Marie Antoinette an underground lesbian icon during the early 20th century.

The Temple of Friendship at Natalie Barney's home at 20, Rue Jacob

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 (248); the house she buys, with its temple in a corner of an overgrown garden, is on the Rue Jacob, the street where Barney lived and held her salon. Stephen is ambivalent about Valérie, however, suspecting that Valérie liked her "only because she thought me what I am" (248), and does not visit her again until after the war, when Brockett persuades her that Mary is too isolated. At Valérie's salon they meet other inverts and are welcomed, "for no bond is more binding than that of affliction" (356). Valérie herself is 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." (352)

The following spring they accept an invitation to "do the round" (380) of gay cafés and bars with a group of friends that includes Brockett and a bored and faintly disapproving Valérie Seymour. This sequence is structured as a descent into hell, each location they visit more miserable than the last. At the worst, a bar called Alec's, they encounter "the battered remnants of men who... despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation" (387).

Natalie Barney, the model for Valérie Seymour

Hall's portayal of the Paris subculture disturbed many of her friends; Romaine Brooks called her "a digger-up of worms with the pretension of a distinguished archaeologist". Hall's biographer Sally Cline points out that she was also familiar with gay cafés more upbeat than those she depicted in The Well, and it is a commonplace of criticism that her own experience was not as miserable as Stephen's. However, Hall was not concerned with presenting a balanced picture of "inverted" life in her time, but with making a plea for understanding from the outside world. By focusing on misery and describing its cause as "ceaseless persecution" by "the so-called just and righteous" (388-389), she intensified the urgency of that plea.

Religious, philosophical, and scientific content

Sexology

Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness in part to popularize the ideas of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who regarded homosexuality not as a sin or an acquired condition but as an inborn and inalterable trait: congenital sexual inversion. In Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), the book Stephen first reads in her father's study, inversion is described as a degenerative disorder common in families with histories of mental illness. Exposure to these ideas leads Stephen to describe herself and other inverts as "hideously maimed and ugly" (204). However, later texts such Sexual Inversion (1896) by Havelock Ellis did not see inversion as a defect. Ellis himself contributed a brief foreword to The Well in which he said that inverts "while different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes of the highest character and the finest aptitudes". By 1901 Krafft-Ebing had adopted a similar view.

The term sexual inversion implied not just homosexuality, but gender role reversal. Female inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally male pursuits and dress. According to Krafft-Ebing, the most extreme also exhibited reversal of secondary sex characteristics; Ellis's research had not demonstrated any such physical differences, but he devoted a great deal of study to the search for them. The idea appears in The Well in Stephen's unusual proportions at birth and in the scene set at Valerie Seymour's salon, where "the timbre of a voice, the build of an ankle, the texture of a hand" (352) reveals the inversion of the guests.

The concept of inversion as, in Krafft-Ebing's words, "[t]he masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom" resembles modern conceptions of transsexualism, and while The Well has been read as a lesbian novel since its publication, some critics now argue that Stephen Gordon should be seen as a transman rather than a lesbian. In fact, Michael Dillon, who in 1946 became the first female-to-male transsexual to undergo full sex reassignment surgery, used Stephen as an example in his book about his own experiences.

The existence of feminine women in lesbian relationships posed a problem for inversion theory, since their attraction to women could not be explained as a gender reversal. Ellis had described such women as passive objects of the desire of masculine inverts, "possess[ing] a genuine, though not precisely sexual, preference for women over men". Mary, however, actively pursues the reticent Stephen. Although Stephen believes she is freeing Mary for a heterosexual life with Martin Hallam at the end of The Well, Mary's future remains unknown and her sexual identity unclear.

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 who at one time had 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 for 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" (21-22). This childish desire for martyrdom prefigures Stephen's ultimate self-sacrifice for Mary's sake. Immediately after she tricks Mary into leaving her for Martin — carrying out a plan that leads Valérie to exclaim "you were made for a martyr!" (434) — Stephen, 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. With their collective voice 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...." (205) Hall uses the mark of Cain, a sign of shame and exile, throughout the novel as a metaphor for the situation of inverts. Her defense of inversion took the form of a religious argument: inverts were "put into the world by God's will alone" and therefore should be accepted by humanity. 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.

Publication and contemporary response

Three publishers praised The Well but turned it down. Then Hall's agent sent the manuscript to Jonathan Cape, who, though cautious about publishing a potentially controversial book, saw in it the potential for a commercial success. Cape tested the waters by starting with a small print run, priced at 15 shillings — about twice the cost of an average novel — to keep the book out of the hands of sensation-seekers. Publication, originally scheduled for autumn 1928, was moved up when Cape discovered that another novel with a lesbian theme — Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women — was to be published in September. Though the two books would prove to have little in common, both Hall and Cape saw Extraordinary Women as a competitor and wanted to beat it to market. The book appeared on July 27, in a black cover with a discreet plain jacket. Cape sent review copies only to serious periodicals that he thought would handle the subject matter non-sensationally.

Early reviews were largely positive. Some reviewers found the novel too preachy or thought its propagandistic aims interfered with its literary merit; some, including Leonard Woolf, thought it was poorly structured; some complained of sloppiness in style. Others, however, praised both its sincerity and its artistry. Some reviewers even expressed sympathy with Hall's moral argument. In the three weeks after the book appeared in bookstores, no reviewer called for its suppression or suggested that it should not have been published. Cape's London salesman later said he had heard no complaints about the book's subject matter, only about its price. Con O'Leary, in a review for T.P.'s & Cassell's Weekly, foresaw no difficulties for The Well: "One cannot say what effect this book will have on the public attitude of silence or derision, but every reader will agree with Mr. Havelock Ellis in the preface, that 'the poignant situations are set forth with a complete absence of offense.'"

Sunday Express campaign

James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express newspaper, did not agree. Douglas was a dedicated moralist, an exponent of "muscular Christianity", which sought to reinvigorate the church and counteract the decadence of modern life by promoting physical health and manliness. His colorfully worded editorials on subjects such as "the flapper vote" and "modern sex novelists" — which shared the pages of the Sunday Express with gossip, murderers' confessions, and features about the love affairs of great men and women of the past — helped the Express family of papers prosper in the cutthroat circulation wars of the late 20s. Vorlage:Quote box Douglas's campaign against The Well of Loneliness began on Saturday, August 18, with a teaser in the Daily Express promising to expose "A Book That Should Be Suppressed", backed up by poster and billboard advertising. In his editorial the next day, Douglas wrote that "sexual inversion and perversion" had already become too visible and that the publication of The Well brought home the need for society to "cleans[e] itself from the leprosy of these lepers". For Douglas The Well's view of homosexuality as innate was "pseudoscientific" and incompatible with the Christian doctrine of free will; instead, he argued, homosexuals were damned by their own choice — which meant that others could be corrupted by "their propaganda". Above all, children must be protected: "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." He called on the publishers to withdraw the book and the Home Secretary to start prosecution if they did not.

In what Hall described as an act of "imbecility coupled with momentary panic", Jonathan Cape told the Sunday Express that he would withdraw the novel if persuaded that it would be in the public interest to do so, and sent a copy to the Home Secretary for his opinion. The Home Secretary at the time was William Joynson-Hicks, a Conservative known for his crackdowns on alcohol, nightclubs, and gambling; the Bishop of Durham had called him a "dour fanatic". He took only two days to reply that The Well was "inherently obscene" and "gravely detrimental to the public interest"; if Cape did not withdraw it voluntarily, criminal proceedings would be brought.

Cape announced that he had stopped publication, but he secretly had molds of the type flown to Paris and sub-leased the rights to a French publisher, Pegasus Press. By September 28 the book was back in print and being delivered by mail to the London bookseller Leopold Hill, who acted as distributor. With publicity increasing demand, sales were brisk, but the reappearance of The Well of Loneliness on bookstore shelves soon came to the attention of the Home Office, and on October 3 Joynson-Hicks issued a warrant for shipments of the book to be seized.

One consignment of 250 copies was stopped at Dover. Then the Chairman of the Board of Customs balked. He had read The Well and considered it a fine book, not at all obscene; he wanted no part of suppressing it. On October 19 he released the seized copies for delivery to Leopold Hill's premises, where the Metropolitan Police were waiting with a search warrant. Hill and Cape were summoned to appear at Bow Street Magistrates' Court on November 9 to show cause why the book should not be destroyed.

Response

From its beginning, the Sunday Express's campaign drew the attention of other newspapers. Some backed Douglas, including the Sunday Chronicle, the People, and Truth, which called The Well a piece of propaganda in defense of vice, all the more dangerous for its cleverness. But most of the British press supported Hall's right to publish. The Nation suggested that the Sunday Express had only started its campaign against The Well because it was August, the journalistic silly season when good stories are scarce, while the Yorkshire Post accused Douglas of driving up the book's sales figures. Country Life and Lady's Pictorial both ran positive reviews of The Well. Arnold Dawson of the Daily Herald, a Labour newspaper, said no one would give the book to a child, no child would want to read it, and any who did would find nothing harmful. The Herald printed a scathing condemnation of the Home Office by H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw and started a counter-campaign that helped Hall obtain statements of support from the National Union of Railwaymen and the South Wales Miners' Federation. Vorlage:Quote box Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster drafted a letter of protest against the censorship of The Well, assembling a long list of supporters that included George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Bennett, Lytton Strachey, Vera Brittain, and Ethel Smyth. According to Virginia Woolf, the plan broke down when Hall objected to the wording of the letter, insisting it mention her book's "artistic merit — even genius". The Well's sentimental romanticism, traditional form, and lofty, Biblically-influenced style — using words like withal, betoken, and hath — did not appeal to Modernist aesthetics; not all those willing to defend it on grounds of literary freedom were equally willing to praise its artistry. The petition dwindled to a short letter in the Nation and Athenaeum, signed by Forster and Virginia Woolf, that focused on the chilling effects of censorship on writers.

UK trial

Cape's solicitor, Harold Rubinstein, sent out 160 letters to potential expert witnesses. Many were reluctant to appear in court; according to Virginia Woolf, "they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins". Between 40 and 60 turned up on the day of the trial, including Woolf herself, Forster, and such diverse figures as biologist Julian Huxley, Laurence Housman of the British Sexological Society, Robert Cust JP of the London Morality Council, Charles Ricketts of the Royal Academy of Art, and Rabbi Joseph Frederick Stern of the East London Synagogue. None were allowed to offer their views of the novel. Under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron could and did decide whether the book was obscene without hearing any defense witnesses' testimony on the subject. "I don't think people are entitled to express an opinion on a matter which is the decision of the court", he said. Since Hall herself was not on trial, she had no right to be represented by her own counsel, and Cape's barrister Norman Birkett had persuaded her not to take the stand herself.

Presiding over a packed court, Biron explained that he would apply the Hicklin test of obscenity: a work was obscene if it tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences". Biron's frequent use of the phrase "horrible practices" made his point of view clear early on. More than two months before, when Arnold Bennett had buttonholed James Douglas at his club about his attack on The Well of Loneliness, it was Biron who defended him, insisting the book must be banned.

Birkett arrived in court two hours late. In his defense, he tried to claim that the relationships between women in The Well of Loneliness were purely Platonic in nature. Biron replied, "I have read the book." Hall, who before the trial had urged Birkett not to "sell the inverts in our defense", took advantage of a lunch recess to tell him that if he continued to maintain her book had no lesbian content she would stand up in court and tell the magistrate the truth before anyone could stop her. Birkett was forced to retract. He argued instead that the book was tasteful and possessed a high degree of literary merit. James Melville, appearing for Leopold Hill, took a similar line: the book was "written in a reverend spirit", not to inspire libidinous thoughts but to examine a social question. The theme itself should not be forbidden, and the book's treatment of its theme was unexceptionable. Vorlage:Quote box Biron gave his judgment a week later. He held that the book's literary merit was irrelevant because a well-written obscene book was even more harmful than a poorly written one: "The more palatable the poison the more insidious." The topic in itself was not necessarily unacceptable; a book that depicted the "moral and physical degradation which indulgence in those vices must necessary involve" might be allowed, but since The Well was a plea for the recognition and toleration of inverts, no reasonable person could say that it was not obscene. He ordered the book destroyed, with the defendants to pay court costs.

Appeal

The defendants appealed the judgment to the London Court of Quarter Sessions. For the appeal, Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip solicited testimony from biological and medical experts and from the writer Rudyard Kipling. According to Hugh Walpole, Kipling said there was "[t]oo much of the abnormal in all of us to play about with it". When Kipling appeared on the morning of the trial, however, Inskip told him he would not be needed. James Melville had wired his witnesses the night before to tell them not to come in. The panel of twelve magistrates who heard the appeal had to rely on the passages that Inskip read to them for knowledge of the book, since the Director of Public Prosecutions had refused to release any copies for them to read. After deliberating for only five minutes, they upheld Biron's decision.

Parodies

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In "St. Stephen", from The Sink of Solitude, Radclyffe Hall is nailed to a cross. Joynson-Hicks looks on, with a copy of The Well in his pocket, while Cupid makes a derisive gesture and Sappho leaps across the scene.

The Sink of Solitude, an anonymous lampoon in verse by "several hands", appeared in late 1928. Illustrated by Beresford Egan, it satirized both sides of the controversy over The Well of Loneliness, but its primary targets were Douglas and Joynson-Hicks ("Two Good Men — never mind their intellect") and their efforts to censor literature. Though the introduction, by journalist P. R. Stephensen, described The Well's moral argument as "feeble" and dismissed Havelock Ellis as a "psychopath", The Sink itself endorsed the view of homosexuality as innate:

Though SAPPHO burned with a peculiar flame

God understands her, we must do the same,
And of such eccentricities we say

"'Tis true, 'tis pity: she was made that way."

It portrayed Hall, however, as an unworthy successor to Sappho, a humorless moralist who had a great deal in common with the opponents of her novel. One illustration, picking up on the theme of religious martyrdom in The Well, showed Hall nailed to a cross. The image horrified Hall; her guilt at being depicted in a cartoon that she saw as blasphemous led to her choice of a religious subject for her next novel, The Master of the House.

The Policeman of the Lord, written by Stephensen and illustrated by Egan, appeared later the same year; it focused on Joynson-Hicks, who, recounting his accomplishments, says "For have I not already stopped the Well / Of Loneliness and thereby made it sell?" A third lampoon targeting censorship of literature conflated The Well of Loneliness with another banned book, Norah C. James's Sleeveless Errand, in its title, The Well of Sleevelessness: A Tale for the Least of These Little Ones (1929).

US publication and trial

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. had planned to publish The Well of Loneliness in the United States at the same time as Cape in the United Kingdom. But after Cape moved up the publication date, Knopf found itself in the position of publishing a book that had been withdrawn in its home country. Blanche Knopf told Hall that "No American publisher could now handle it except as pornography."

Cape sold the US rights to the recently formed publishing house of Pascal Covici and Donald Friede. Friede decided to acquire the The Well after overhearing talk about it at a party at Theodore Dreiser's house. He had previously sold a copy of Dreiser's An American Tragedy to a Boston police officer in order to create a censorship test case, which he had lost; he was awaiting an appeal, which he would also lose. Friede took out a $10,000 bank loan to outbid another publisher that had offered a $7,500 advance, and enlisted the lawyer Morris Ernst — co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union — to defend the book against legal challenges. Friede invited John Saxton Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to buy a copy directly from him, to ensure that he, not a bookseller, would be the one prosecuted. He also travelled to Boston to give a copy to the Watch and Ward Society, hoping both to further challenge censorship of literature and to generate more publicity; he was disappointed when they told him they saw nothing wrong with the book.

The symbol of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, depicting book burning.

In New York, Sumner and several police detectives seized 865 copies of the book from Covici-Friede's offices. Friede was charged with selling an obscene publication. But the book department at Macy's defied Sumner's threat of prosecution, and The Well remained available throughout the country. By the time the case came to trial, it had already been reprinted six times. Despite its price of $5 — twice the cost of an average novel — it would sell over 100,000 copies in its first year.

In the US, as in the UK, the Hicklin test of obscenity applied, but New York case law had established that books should be judged by their effects on adults rather than on children and that literary merit was relevant. Ernst obtained statements from authors including Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, H. L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair, Ellen Glasgow, and John Dos Passos. To make sure these supporters did not go unheard, he incorporated their opinions into his brief. His argument relied heavily on a comparison with Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier, which had been cleared of obscenity in the 1922 case Halsey v. New York. Mademoiselle de Maupin also described a lesbian relationship, and it did so in more explicit terms than The Well. According to Ernst, The Well had greater social value because it was more serious in tone and made a case against misunderstanding and intolerance.

In an opinion issued on February 19, 1929, Magistrate Hyman Bushel declined to take the book's literary qualities into account and said The Well was "calculated to deprave and corrupt minds open to its immoral influences". Under New York law, however, Bushel was not a trier of fact; he could only remand the case to the New York Court of Special Sessions for judgment. On April 19, that court issued a three-paragraph decision stating that The Well's theme — a "delicate social problem" — did not violate the law unless written in such a way as to make it obscene. After "[a] careful reading of the entire book", they cleared it of obscenity.

Covici-Friede then imported a copy of the Pegasus Press edition from France as a further test case and to solidify the book's U.S. copyright. The United States Customs Court declared the book obscene, but its decision was reversed on appeal.

Subsequent publication and availability

Despite the British ban, the Pegasus Press edition of the book remained available in France. In a "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, Janet Flanner reported that it sold most heavily at the news vendor's cart serving passengers travelling to London on La Fleche D'Or. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, could not stock enough copies to meet demand.

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Clockwise from top left: German, Portugese, Czech, and Spanish editions of The Well of Loneliness

In 1946, after Hall's death, Troubridge wanted to include The Well in a "Collected Memorial Edition" of Hall's works. Peter Davies of the Windmill Press wrote to the Home Office's legal advisor to ask whether the post-war Labour administration would allow the book to be republished. Unknown to Troubridge, however, he added a postscript saying "I am not really anxious to do The Well of Loneliness and am rather relieved than otherwise by any lack of enthusiasm I may encounter in official circles." Home Secretary James Chuter Ede told Troubridge that any publisher reprinting The Well would risk legal proceedings. The book was not republished in the UK until 1949, when Falcon Press brought out an edition with no legal challenge. It has been in print continuously ever since, has been translated into at least 14 languages, and in the 1960s was still selling 100,000 copies a year in the United States alone. In 1974, it was read to a national audience in the UK on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime.

Other 1928 lesbian novels

Three other novels with lesbian themes were published in England in 1928. Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel is the story of a young woman on holiday who is fascinated by a sophisticated older woman and becomes the subject of malicious gossip. Virginia Woolf's Orlando is the fictional biography of a young man born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I who does not age, and who changes sex at the age of thirty, after which "through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved". Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, the book that led Jonathan Cape to move up publication of The Well, is a satire about a group of lesbians on Capri. None of these books was written as a defense of lesbianism or a plea for tolerance, and none of them was censored. The Home Office did consider prosecuting Extraordinary Women, but concluded that it lacked the "earnestness" of The Well and would not inspire readers to adopt "the practices referred to". Mackenzie was disappointed; he had hoped a censorship case would increase his book's sales. Despite advertising that tried to cash in on The Well's notoriety by announcing that Radclyffe Hall was the model for one of the characters, it sold only 2,000 copies.

A fourth 1928 novel, Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack, not only contains a character based on Radclyffe Hall but includes passages that may be a response to The Well. Ladies Almanack is a roman à clef of lesbian literary and artistic circles in Paris, written in an archaic, Rabelaisian style and starring Natalie Barney — the model for The Well's Valérie Seymour — as Dame Evangeline Musset. Much as Sir Phillip paces his study worrying about Stephen, Dame Musset's father "pac[es] his library in the most Normal of Night-Shirts, trying to think of ways to bring his erring Child back into that Religion and Activity which has ever been thought sufficient for a Woman". When he confronts her, however, she replies: "Thou, good Governor, wast expecting a Son when you lay atop of your Choosing, why then be so mortal wounded when you perceive that you have your Wish? Am I not doing after your very Desire, and is it not the more commendable, seeing that I do it without the Tools for the Trade, and yet nothing complain?" Ladies Almanack is far more overtly sexual than The Well; its cryptic style, full of in-jokes and ornate language, may have been intended to disguise its content from censors. It could not in any case have been prosecuted by the Home Office, since it was published only in France, in a privately printed edition of 1,050 copies. It did not become widely available until 1972.

Social impact and legacy

James Douglas's editorial in the Sunday Express, August 19, 1928

In 1921, the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain had opposed a bill that would have criminalized lesbianism on the grounds that "of every thousand women... 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices". This may not have been literally true, but it was true that lesbianism had little visibility. Sexological texts were normally sold only to medical and legal professionals, and, like the copy of Psychopathia Sexualis in The Well of Loneliness, were often kept on locked shelves. While their ideas were becoming known in some circles by the 1920s, the controversy over The Well of Loneliness made sexual inversion a subject of household conversation for the first time.

James Douglas illustrated his denunciation of The Well with a photograph of Radclyffe Hall with short hair, smoking jacket, and bow tie, holding a cigarette and monocle. She was also wearing a straight knee-length skirt; later Sunday Express articles cropped the photo so tightly that it became difficult to tell that Hall was not wearing trousers. Hall's style of dress was not scandalous in the 1920s; short hairstyles were common, and the combination of man-tailored jackets and short skirts was a recognized fashion, discussed in magazines as the "severely masculine" look. Some lesbians, like Hall, adopted variations of the style as a way of signalling their sexuality, but it was a code that only a select few knew how to read. With the controversy over The Well of Loneliness, Hall became the public face of sexual inversion, and all women who favored masculine fashions came under new scrutiny. Lesbian journalist Evelyn Irons — who considered Hall's style of dress "rather effeminate" compared to her own — said that after the publication of The Well, truck drivers would call out on the street to any woman who wore a collar and tie: "Oh, you're Miss Radclyffe Hall". Some welcomed this newfound visibility: when Hall spoke at a luncheon in 1932, the audience was full of women who had imitated her look. But in a study of lesbian women in Salt Lake City in the 1920s and '30s, nearly all regretted the publication of The Well because it had led people to label any woman who wore a suit as lesbian.

In a study of a working class lesbian community in Buffalo, New York in the 1940s and 50s, The Well of Loneliness was the only work of lesbian literature anyone had read or heard of. According to Esther Newton, until at least 1970 it was "the lesbian novel". The Well's name recognition made it possible to find when bookstores and libraries did not yet have sections devoted to LGBT literature, and lack of information about lesbianism from other sources increased its influence. As late as 1994, an article in Feminist Review noted that The Well "regularly appears in coming-out stories — and not just those of older lesbians". It has often been mocked: Terry Castle says that "like many bookish lesbians I seem to have spent much of my adult life making jokes about it", and Mary Renault, who read it in 1938, remembered laughing at its "earnest humourlessness" and "impermissible allowance of self-pity". Yet it has also produced powerful emotional responses, both positive and negative. One woman was so angry at the thought of how The Well would affect an "isolated emerging lesbian" that she "wrote a note in the library book, to tell other readers that women loving women can be beautiful." A Holocaust survivor said, "Remembering that book, I wanted to live long enough to kiss another woman."

In the 1970s and early 80s, when lesbian feminists rejected the butch and femme identities that Hall's novel had helped to define, writers like Jane Rule and Blanche Wiesen Cook criticized The Well for presenting lesbianism in terms of masculinity. A 1989 paper by Esther Newton challenged this "anti-Well approach" by arguing that Hall had embraced the concept of the "mannish lesbian" as an alternative to limiting, asexual 19th century models of romantic friendship. Since then critics have increasingly seen Stephen's masculinity in historical context rather than attacking its influence.

Feminists in the 70s and 80s also criticized The Well for its expressions of self-pity and for presenting lesbian life as "joyless". In her 1981 history of lesbianism, Surpassing the Love of Men, Lillian Faderman quoted one lesbian as saying that after reading The Well, "for the first time in my life, I felt a certain shame about my feelings towards women"; she summed up its effects as "devastating". Its reputation as "the most depressing lesbian novel ever written" persists and is still controversial. Some critics see it as reinforcing homophobic beliefs, while others argue that its tragedy and its depiction of shame are the very factors that make it compelling.

Although The Well no longer has the cultural power that it once did, it still compels critical attention, and although few have defended its literary merit, it continues to elicit a high level of personal engagement from its critics.

Adaptations

Wilette Kershaw, an American actress who was staging banned plays in Paris, optioned the rights to The Well of Loneliness for £100. Hall signed the contract, but when she and Troubridge saw Kershaw act, they found her too feminine for the role of Stephen. Hall tried to void the contract on a technicality, but Kershaw refused to alter her plans; her solicitor pointed out that since the book had been banned in the UK it was probably unprotected by copyright. The play opened on September 2, 1930, billed as "The Well of Loneliness from the novel by Radclyffe Hall". No playwright was credited for the adaptation, implying that Hall had written it herself; it was actually written by one of Kershaw's ex-husbands, who added characters and made the story more upbeat. Janet Flanner reported on the opening night for The New Yorker:

[T]o top three acts of tableaux vivants, containing eleven scenes, Miss Wilette Kershaw made a curtain speech in which she begged humanity, "already used to earthquakes and murderers," to try to put up with a minor calamity like the play's and the book's Lesbian protagonist, Stephen Gordon. However, she made up in costume what she lacked in psychology: dressing gown by Sulka, riding breeches by Hoare, boots by Bunting, crop by Briggs, briquet by Dunhill, and British accent — as the program did not bother to state — by Broadway.

Hall threatened a lawsuit to stop the production, but the issue became moot since the play, panned by critics, closed quickly. Publicity from the episode increased sales of the novel.

No movie version was ever made. According to a story that may be apocryphal, Samuel Goldwyn considered producing an adaptation; when a colleague questioned the idea, he replied "Where they got lesbians, we'll use Albanians."

Datei:Children of Loneliness.jpg

Poster for a New York showing of Children of Loneliness

A 1951 French film set in a girls' boarding school was released in the United States as The Pit of Loneliness to capitalize on the notoriety of The Well, but was actually adapted from the anonymous novel Olivia, now known to have been written by Dorothy Bussy. A mid-1930s exploitation film, Children of Loneliness, claimed to be "inspired by" The Well, but little of Hall's novel can be discerned in its story of a butch lesbian who is blinded with acid and run over by a truck, freeing the naïve young roommate she seduced to find love with a fullback. A critic for the Motion Picture Herald reported that during the film's run in Los Angeles in 1937 — as a double feature with Love Life of a Gorilla — a self-identified "doctor" appeared on stage after the screening to sell pamphlets purporting to explain homosexuality. He was arrested for selling obscene literature.

External links

• Vorlage:Gutenberg Australia
• Sir Chartres Biron's judgment

References

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