When Radclyffe Hall’s infamous novel The Well of Loneliness was published in London in 1928, it was greeted with a wave of hostile criticism: “Acts of the most horrible, unnatural and disgusting obscenity,” wrote one critic. James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, stated, “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel."

All this for a novel that did not contain any sex act other than kissing. That is, between women.

Credited with helping to define lesbianism in the twentieth century, The Well of Loneliness was the first English novel written by a lesbian to focus openly on homosexuality. While critics and readers alike disagree on whether the novel was beneficial or harmful to lesbians at the time, it is undeniable that The Well has had a major impact on countless lesbians’ lives since its publication.

By the time of Radclyffe Hall’s death in 1943, The Well of Loneliness had been translated into numerous different languages and remains in print today.

Historian Lillian Faderman has theorized, “There was probably no lesbian in the four decades between 1928 and the late 1960s capable of reading English or any of the eleven languages into which the book was translated who was unfamiliar with The Well of Loneliness.”

The novel tells the story of Stephen Mary Olivia Gertrude Gordon, named Stephen because her father so desired a son that when he found that his wife had delivered him a daughter, he chose to keep the name he had selected for a boy. Stephen’s father, Sir Phillip Gordon, is a wealthy Englishman who dotes upon his daughter, but realizes during her childhood that she is an invert—the psychological classification, at the time, for a lesbian.

As a child, Stephen enjoys dressing up in boys’ clothing, often acts boyish, and falls in love with the housemaid, Collins. As she grows up she develops many traditionally masculine traits, including athleticism. After her father’s death, Stephen decides to become a writer; she also meets Mary Llewelyn and falls in love with her, and they live together in Paris where they become part of the gay and lesbian café society of the 1920s.

But this “gay” life only masks a reality of pain and despair, as “inverts” not rejected by mainstream society as abnormal and repulsive.”

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