The 1928 novel about an Englishwoman who loves women and says so, which a London magistrate ordered destroyed four months after it was published and a New York court cleared five months after that.
Radclyffe Hall's fifth novel follows Stephen Gordon, a fictional Englishwoman, from her birth on a Worcestershire estate to middle age in Paris. Her father wanted a son and gave her the name he had chosen. She grows up riding and fencing, falls in love with women, is turned out of her home for it, drives an ambulance in France during the First World War, and settles at last in a house on the Left Bank with the woman she loves. The book calls her an invert, the term the sexologists of the day used, and argues that women like her are made this way and are owed a place. There is almost no sex in it. It was banned in Britain all the same. Half the novel is set in Paris, and the salon hostess Valérie Seymour is drawn from the American writer [Natalie Clifford Barney](person:natalie-barney).
Jonathan Cape published The Well of Loneliness in London on 27 July 1928 at fifteen shillings, roughly double the price of an ordinary novel. The high price was a signal that this was a serious book for serious readers, and it came with a one-page commentary from the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who called it "the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life." The first reviews were calm and several were warm.
On 19 August the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, ran a leading article headed "A Book That Must Be Suppressed". His argument was that the cleverness of the book made it more dangerous rather than less, and he demanded its immediate withdrawal. Cape sent a copy to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, and asked for a view. The view came back that the book must go. Cape withdrew it, then sent the printing moulds to the Pegasus Press in Paris and had copies shipped back into England. Customs seized a consignment at Dover in October, and the Director of Public Prosecutions moved against Cape and the London distributor Leopold Hill under the Obscene Publications Act 1857.
The case was heard at Bow Street Magistrates' Court from 9 November 1928. Around forty witnesses had come to speak for the book, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster among them. The Chief Magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, would not hear them: whether a book was obscene, he held, was a question for the court and not for novelists. Hall sat in court through all of it and was never called, because she was not the defendant. On 16 November Biron ruled the novel an obscene libel and ordered every copy destroyed. His reasoning was not that the book was indecent but that it asked for lesbian lives to be tolerated rather than condemned. The appeal was heard at the County of London Sessions on 14 December and dismissed with costs.
The American outcome was the opposite. Covici-Friede, a New York firm five months old, published the novel in January 1929. John Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had copies seized within weeks, and in February a magistrate named Hyman Bushel found the book obscene and sent the publishers for trial. On 19 April 1929 the Court of Special Sessions cleared it, holding that a book dealing with a delicate social problem does not break the law simply by dealing with it. Covici-Friede printed a two-volume victory edition carrying their lawyer Morris Ernst's account of the case, and the novel sold in numbers Hall's earlier books had never approached.
The Well of Loneliness was not published in Britain again until Falcon Press brought it out in 1949, twenty-one years after the destruction order and six years after Hall's death. It has stayed in print since.
Sir Philip Gordon and his wife Anna, who live at Morton in Worcestershire, wait ten years for a child. Sir Philip is certain it will be a son and has already chosen the name Stephen. The child is a daughter. He has her christened Stephen anyway, brings her up to ride astride, fence and read Greek, and never tells his wife what he has begun to suspect about her. Anna cannot love the girl and does not know why. At seven Stephen falls in love with a housemaid called Collins; at twelve she is given an Irish hunter named Raftery; at fourteen she is handed over to a governess, Miss Puddleton, who is small, grey, sharp-tongued and the best teacher in the book.
At eighteen Stephen meets Martin Hallam, a young Canadian who talks about trees and treats her as an equal. They become close friends. When he proposes, she flees from him in what the novel calls terror and repulsion, and he leaves England within a fortnight. Her father is the one person who might explain it to her, and when she asks him directly he lies, kindly, and tells her there is nothing strange about her. Soon afterwards he is crushed by a falling cedar branch in his own garden and dies trying to say the thing he never said.
Three years later Stephen meets Angela Crossby, the American wife of a retired Birmingham hardware manufacturer who has bought a Tudor house nearby. The affair that follows is the ruin of Book Two. Stephen writes Angela a long letter; Angela, frightened for herself, gives it to her husband; the husband sends a copy to Stephen's mother. Anna tells her daughter that she is unnatural, and that one of them must leave Morton. Stephen leaves, and takes Miss Puddleton with her.
In London she publishes a novel, The Furrow, and falls in with Jonathan Brockett, a playwright who is generous, malicious and, the book says plainly, an invert himself. He takes her to Paris and introduces her to Valérie Seymour, an American writer whose flat on the Quai Voltaire is the one place in the city where people like Stephen are at ease. Valérie tells her about a tumbledown house with a good garden in the rue Jacob. Stephen buys it. The novel gives the address twice, in Stephen's own voice: number 35.
The war comes. Stephen joins a women's ambulance unit attached to the French Army Ambulance Corps, drives under shellfire around Compiègne and wins the Croix de Guerre. Her second driver is Mary Llewellyn, a Welsh orphan of nineteen or twenty who learned to drive as her cousin's unpaid chauffeur. After the Armistice they go to Orotava in Tenerife together, and there the thing that has been building between them since the front finally comes out.
No English novel before it had asked, under its author's own name and in plain words, that women who love women be left alone. A magistrate destroyed it for exactly that, and said so: his ruling turned on the book asking for toleration rather than offering condemnation.
Stephen Gordon buys a house in the rue Jacob, and the salon she is taken to belongs to a character drawn from Natalie Clifford Barney, whose real Friday gatherings had been running a few doors away since 1909. The Paris chapters are a portrait of that circle written from inside it, by someone who knew the people.
London ordered every copy destroyed in November 1928. New York cleared the same book in April 1929, holding that a novel does not break the law by dealing with a delicate subject. Nothing in between had been changed.
A tall, awkward, gifted girl who rides better than any man in the county, wins prizes for her fencing, publishes novels, and is told by her own mother that her face is an insult to her dead father. Whatever has dated in the book, she has not.
The Englishwoman the novel follows from birth to middle age: given a boy's name by a father who wanted a son, and turned out of her home at twenty-one for loving a woman.
The Welsh orphan who is Stephen Gordon's second ambulance driver at the front, and afterwards the woman she lives with in Paris.
Stephen Gordon's governess, an Oxford-trained classicist the size of a small box, who knows what Stephen is because she is the same, and never once says so directly.
The American wife of a retired Birmingham manufacturer, bored in the Worcestershire countryside, who lets Stephen Gordon fall in love with her and then hands the evidence to her husband.
The American writer whose Paris flat is the one room in the novel where nobody has to pretend. Radclyffe Hall drew her from Natalie Clifford Barney.
Stephen's father, who worked out what his daughter was from a shelf of German sexology, brought her up accordingly, and died before he could tell anyone.
Stephen's mother: an Irishwoman who adored her husband, could not make herself touch her daughter, and did not know why until she was shown a letter.
A young Canadian who loves trees, becomes Stephen's first real friend, proposes to her, and comes back twenty years later in love with the woman she lives with.
A successful London playwright, malicious and generous by turns, who takes Stephen Gordon to Paris and introduces her to the only people who will have her.
A composer from the Scottish Highlands, living in a cold Paris studio with Barbara, the girl she has loved since they were children in the same village.
The housemaid at Morton, second of three, with whom Stephen Gordon falls in love at the age of seven.
Stephen Gordon's Irish hunter, bought for her at twelve and named after the poet, and the closest thing she has to a confidant for twenty years.
Jamie's companion since childhood in a Highland village, dying slowly of a cough in an unheated Paris studio.
Angela's husband, a retired Birmingham manufacturer with a peevish mouth, who reads Stephen Gordon's love letter and posts a copy to her mother.
The neighbour's son, a bully at ten and an army officer at twenty, who humiliates Stephen Gordon as a child and sleeps with the woman she loves as an adult.
1926
Radclyffe Hall's fourth novel, Adam's Breed, wins both the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She begins the book that becomes The Well of Loneliness.
27 July 1928
Jonathan Cape publishes the novel in London at fifteen shillings, roughly double the price of an ordinary novel, with a one-page commentary by the sexologist Havelock Ellis. Early reviews are calm and several are warm.
19 August 1928
James Douglas of the Sunday Express runs a leading article headed "A Book That Must Be Suppressed" and demands its immediate withdrawal.
Autumn 1928
Cape asks the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, for a view, is told to withdraw the book, and sends the printing moulds to the Pegasus Press in Paris. Customs seize a consignment of the Paris copies at Dover in October.
9–16 November 1928
The case is heard at Bow Street against Jonathan Cape and the distributor Leopold Hill under the Obscene Publications Act 1857. The Chief Magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, refuses to hear the forty-odd defence witnesses, rules the novel an obscene libel on 16 November, and orders every copy destroyed.
14 December 1928
The appeal is dismissed with costs at the County of London Sessions before Sir Robert Wallace and a bench of magistrates.
January–February 1929
Covici-Friede publish the novel in New York. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice has copies seized, and a magistrate finds it obscene and sends the publishers for trial.
19 April 1929
The Court of Special Sessions in New York clears the book, holding that a novel dealing with a delicate social problem does not break the law by dealing with it. A two-volume victory edition follows, carrying the publishers' lawyer Morris Ernst's account of the case.
1949
Falcon Press publishes The Well of Loneliness in Britain, twenty-one years after the destruction order and six years after Hall's death. It has stayed in print since.
1990
Anchor Books issue the American paperback that is still the standard edition in print.
Djuna Barnes's 1936 novel, published eight years later by Faber and Faber in London and edited by T. S. Eliot. It is the other landmark novel about desire between women written in Paris between the wars, and it works in the opposite way: where Hall argues and explains, Barnes refuses to explain anything.
Read our take
James Baldwin's 1956 novel about an American man in Paris who cannot admit what he wants. His publisher told him to burn it. The plainness of the sentences is nothing like Hall, but the situation is the same one — a person who knows what they are, in a city that lets them and a world that does not.
Read our take
Colette's 1932 book of conversations and portraits, largely about desire, with long unembarrassed passages on women who love women in the Paris of the same years. She reports the same circle as a journalist would; Hall built an argument out of it.
Read our take
Colette's 1920 novel about a long love affair that will not fit any acceptable shape. Nothing in it was banned and nobody went to court over it, which is part of the point: the French novel of the period could say things about desire that an English one could not.
Read our takeAn Englishwoman named Stephen Gordon, a fictional character, who loves women and is turned out of her family home for it. Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel follows her from birth on a Worcestershire estate through an ambulance unit in the First World War to a house on the Left Bank in Paris, and argues that women like her are born that way, are not sick and not wicked, and are owed a place.
Because it asked for lesbian lives to be tolerated rather than condemned. The Chief Magistrate at Bow Street, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled on 16 November 1928 that the novel was an obscene libel and ordered every copy destroyed, and his reasoning turned on that plea rather than on anything indecent in the text. The book contains no explicit sex. An appeal was dismissed on 14 December 1928, and it was not published in Britain again until 1949.
No. The first page carries an author's note stating that all the characters are purely imaginary, and Stephen Gordon is an invented character rather than a portrait of Radclyffe Hall. Hall drew on a life she knew — she lived openly with women, wore men's tailoring and was called John by everyone close to her — but Stephen's family, her home and her career are fiction. The one character with a documented model is Valérie Seymour.
Natalie Clifford Barney, the American writer who had lived in Paris since 1902 and held a Friday salon at 20 rue Jacob from 1909. Valérie Seymour is a fictional character in the novel: American, rich, bilingual, writing satires and sketches in French, and running the one room in Paris where nobody in Stephen Gordon's position has to pretend. Radclyffe Hall knew Barney.
Mostly on the Left Bank. Stephen Gordon buys a tumbledown house with a courtyard and a walled garden at 35 rue Jacob, an address she gives twice in her own voice — it is a fictional number in a real street, a few doors from Natalie Clifford Barney's actual house at number 20. Valérie Seymour's flat in the novel is on the Quai Voltaire, and later chapters move through the bars and nightclubs of Montmartre.
The opposite of what happened in Britain. Covici-Friede published it in New York in January 1929, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had copies seized, and a magistrate found it obscene in February. On 19 April 1929 the Court of Special Sessions cleared the novel, holding that a book dealing with a delicate social problem does not break the law by dealing with it. The publishers issued a two-volume victory edition and the case made the book a bestseller.
For what it did, and for Stephen Gordon herself, yes. It is a long, plainly written, chronological novel with a strong first half and a slow middle. Its framework — that Stephen is a congenital "invert", a third sex caught between the other two — is the sexology of 1928 and is not how the subject is described now. The scenes people remember are the childhood at Morton, the governess Puddle's unspoken speech, and the Paris chapters.
