Unlike Stephen, Mary is not a “congenital invert”; she retains attractions to men despite her love for Stephen. Knowing this, Stephen feels guilty for subjecting Mary to such a tragic life, and she resolves to separate from Mary in order to force her to return to the heterosexual world. Because Mary will never leave her without great betrayal, Stephen lies to her and tells her that she’s been having an affair.

Despondent, Mary leaves and falls into the willing arms of their friend Martin Hallam, whom Stephen has arranged to be waiting nearby.

At the very end of the book, Stephen kills herself, surrounded by the ghosts of their friends who have lived a life of torment because of their sexuality. Stephen pleads with her God, “We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!”

The Well of Loneliness was published in the same year as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a novel about a gender-changing poet based on Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. Its first edition even included a photo of Sackville-West dressed as a boy. But Orlando’s lesbianism was elegantly woven into Woolf’s fantastical storytelling, whereas The Well was presented in all of Hall’s straightforward realism. Consequently, The Well of Loneliness was charged with obscenity, despite the fact that, as Jeanette Winterson wrote in 1997 in The Times, “There are no descriptions of sex in it, no rude words, and the lesbian lovers do not live happily ever after.”

This obscenity trial remains one of the most infamous in history, and author Radclyffe Hall was as much on trial as her novel. Hall claimed that The Well upheld a conventional heterosexual morality, as the character of Mary, who was not a true invert like Stephen Gordon, had to follow her heterosexual nature by ultimately marrying a man.

Hall believed in the conclusions of the sexologists of her time, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who argued that lesbianism was not a matter of choice, but was an affliction caused by “congenital inversion” that was present from birth.

One of the main characteristics of inversion, according to Ellis, was a masculine appearance—a belief that continues to be a stereotype today.

Hall herself lived openly as a lesbian, dressing in men’s clothing and sporting a short haircut. Born as Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall in 1880 to an American mother, Marie Diehl, and an English father who left before she was born, Hall preferred to be called John. At 21, Hall inherited her paternal grandfather’s fortune and began a lifetime of traveling to the European continent. At 28, she met Mabel Veronica Batten, known as “Ladye,” who encouraged her to publish her writing and converted her to Catholicism.

She and Ladye lived together until Ladye died until 1915. Shortly before that, Ladye introduced Hall to her cousin, Una, Lady Troubridge, who was at the time the young wife of the elderly Admiral Ernest Troubridge. Hall and Una soon became lovers and stayed together until Hall died of stomach cancer in 1943 in London. Afterward, Una became the chief steward of Hall’s papers and even wrote a biography about her (The Life of Radclyffe Hall).

But despite being part of Paris’s lesbian society and having a substantial financial cushion in the form of her inheritance, Hall’s life with Una was not without its troubles. In 1934 she met Evguenia Souline, a 30-year-old Russian émigré, who became her lover. She, Una, and Evguenia maintained a difficult triangular relationship until Hall’s death.

At the time of the publication of The Well of Loneliness, which Hall intended to be a portrait of an invert, she had already written several well-received novels. Many critics argue that Hall’s 1924 novel The Unlit Lamp, which contains a more muted lesbian storyline, is her best work; her 1926 novel Adam’s Breed was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina Vie Heureuse.

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