The Well of Loneliness
고독의 우물
Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel of 1928 and its obscenity trial. Portraying “sexual inversion” as a natural, God-given state, it pleaded “Give us also the right to our existence”. After an attack by the Sunday Express editor James Douglas and pressure from the Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks, a British court judged it obscene in November 1928 and ordered it destroyed; it was not published in England again until 1949.
In depth
The Well of Loneliness follows Stephen Gordon, an upper-class Englishwoman whose “sexual inversion” is apparent from early on, who finds love with Mary Llewellyn while serving as an ambulance driver in the First World War but suffers social isolation and rejection. Hall called it “the first long and very serious novel entirely upon the subject of sexual inversion” and wrote it partly to popularise the ideas of Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who saw homosexuality as inborn and unalterable “congenital sexual inversion”; Ellis contributed a foreword. The novel portrays inversion as a natural, God-given state and pleads: “Give us also the right to our existence”.
The Well of Loneliness appeared from Jonathan Cape on 27 July 1928. For three weeks no reviewer called for its suppression, but on 19 August James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, launched a campaign: “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.” When Cape sent the book to the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, for his opinion, he replied within two days that it was “gravely detrimental to the public interest”. Cape leased the rights to the Pegasus Press in Paris and kept importing it, and in October the Home Secretary issued a warrant for its seizure.
The obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness opened at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 9 November 1928. Some forty witnesses came, including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Julian Huxley and Laurence Housman of the British Sexological Society, and Norman Haire held that homosexuality ran in families and could not be acquired by reading books, but the Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron, under the Obscene Publications Act 1857, heard no opinions. On 16 November Biron applied the Hicklin test, whether a work tends “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”, held that a well-written obscene book was more harmful than a poor one and ordered the book destroyed regardless of its literary merit. The appeal was dismissed after five minutes.
The Well of Loneliness drew wide support: Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells condemned the Home Office and trade unions expressed solidarity. The book kept entering Britain in its French edition and survived legal challenges in the United States, and in England Falcon Press republished it in 1949 without legal challenge. The controversy raised the visibility of lesbians in British and American culture, and for decades it was the best-known lesbian novel in English.