Back in the Day is a column that looks back at key moments in the history of lesbians and bisexual women in entertainment.
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.” 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.
But Hall will always be known for writing The Well of Loneliness, in part because of the sensationalistic nature of the obscenity trial that followed.
Forced to sell her London home to pay for the trial, Hall stood by her work, and several notable writers were prepared to testify in her defense, including E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West. But the book was banned in Britain and was not reprinted there until the 1960s.
Nonetheless, the novel remained available in France, and an attempt to ban it in the United States failed. Within the first year of its American publication it had sold 10,000 copies.
Critics have questioned whether the novel underlines heterosexual norms or undermines them: does Hall merely accept Havelock Ellis’s biological determinism model of homosexuality, which also pathologizes it? Or does Hall’s allegiance with the character of the mannish lesbian allow her to claim a female sexual identity separate from the romantic (but non-sexual) friendships between women in 19th century literature?
Esther Newton, in her classic essay “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian,” argues the latter, and Sonja Ruehl contends that in fact Hall’s acceptance of the congenital inversion theory was a way to reclaim the identity as gays and lesbians have reclaimed originally pejorative words like “queer,” “dyke,” and “fag.”
Even though the character of Stephen Gordon does not have a happy life or experience a happy ending, her very existence has clearly been a touchstone for countless lesbians over the course of the twentieth century who clung to any affirmation that people like them existed.
Early on in the novel Hall writes of young Stephen, “How she hated soft dresses and sashes, and ribbons, and small coral beads, and openwork stockings! Her legs felt so free and comfortable in breeches; she adored pockets too, and these were forbidden-at least really adequate pockets.”
Stephen’s love of pockets, and numerous other little details like this, must have seemed like a revelation to lesbian readers.
It is arguable that The Well opened up a demand for literature about lesbians that continues to this day. Lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s continued to tell dramatic, depressing stories about lesbians who were ostracized by heterosexual society, by and large accurately reflecting the times in which they were published.
These books, like The Well of Loneliness, enabled lesbian readers to recognize themselves, to know that they weren’t alone in the world, even though the world might not accept them.
It wasn’t until Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle was published in 1973 that a truly happy lesbian love story was told.
Radclyffe Hall and her character Stephen Gordon have both become lesbian icons of a bygone era: masculine women of the romantic 1920s, moneyed elites who moved in literary society despite, or because of, their sexuality.
Indeed, Radclyffe Hall has been romanticized by numerous biographers, beginning with her lover Lady Troubridge. Since her death at least seven biographies of Hall have been published, as well as one volume of her love letters and one biography of Una Troubridge.
One look at the photos of Hall in her youth make it clear why she is such a fascinating subject: posting with her cigarette, looking straight out at the camera, dressed unapologetically like a fashionable gentleman, it seems clear that Hall lived a life of passion as well as pathos. She-and Stephen Gordon-are the perfect tragic heroes of lesbianism.
Thankfully, their existence helped pave the way for lesbian heroes who were able, at last, to experience joy.
