While its literary value has been questioned, and many of its values now appear outdated, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness still holds a place as a beacon for sexual self-discovery, writes Hephzibah Anderson in BBC Culture's Banned Books series.
When a book
has been banned on grounds of obscenity, a reader may be forgiven for coming to
it with certain expectations. In the case of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of
Loneliness, those expectations are decidedly misleading. For all the clasping
of hands and flushing of cheeks that fill its nearly 500 pages, this is no Lady
Chatterley's Lover.
Both were
published in 1928 and subsequently banned, but whereas DH Lawrence described
his protagonists' trysts in vocabulary that would still necessitate asterisks
here, Hall stops at the bedchamber door. Aside from a kiss that is "full
on the lips, as a lover", the coyly phrased "that night they were not
divided" is as racy as The Well of Loneliness gets.
The
controversy of course stemmed not from what was being done so much as who was
doing it with whom. If Lady Chatterley caused a scandal by showing lust to be
no respecter of class boundaries, Hall's novel was still more shocking because
its protagonist, despite being named Stephen Gordon, is a woman, and her
supposedly masculine proclivities extend far beyond her name. She weightlifts
and refuses to ride side saddle; she gets her clothes made by a tailor rather
than a dressmaker and longs to cut her hair short; and from a young age she's
prone to unusually intense feelings for other women.
In early
adulthood, those girlish crushes blossom into a torrid affair with a bored
American housewife, Angela Crossby. After Stephen's mother, Lady Anna, finds
out and banishes her from the family home, Stephen becomes a writer and travels
to Paris, where she's taken under the wing of a lesbian salonnière. Later, she
serves in the ambulance corps during World War One and falls for fellow
servicewoman Mary Llewellyn – she from whom Stephen will be "not divided".
The novel
chronicles her nascent understanding of differences she's sensed in herself for
as long as she can remember – differences dubbed "queer" behind her
back. However, what truly sealed its fate when it landed in the dock at Bow
Street Magistrates Court mere months after publication is the case it dares to
make for recognition and tolerance of Stephen's sexuality. Hear her plea at the
novel's fevered end: "Rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God,
before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!" Not only
is this a novel that strives to humanise the experience of outcast lesbians, it
also argues for equality.
In 2019,
newly revealed papers from Hall's archive at the University of Texas's Harry
Ransom Center showed that thousands of readers had written to her to protest
the novel's ban. "It has made me want to live and to go on," wrote
one. Unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism wasn't in fact illegal in the UK in
1928, though that position should not be mistaken for tolerance. In fact, Stephen's
prayer was destined to grow only more radical-seeming for some decades to come,
and for generations of women – and men – on their own difficult passages to
sexual self-discovery, The Well of Loneliness became a beacon.
If the
book's historical and cultural significance is unquestionable, its text
inevitably feels dated almost a century on. There's Hall's language, for
starters. The first edition carried an "appreciation" by her friend
Havelock Ellis, the sexologist whose theory of "sexual inversion" she
supported, and his word "invert" – until then restricted to scientific
literature – appears throughout Stephen's story.
Also
jarring is the apologetic way in which Stephen's sexuality is framed, and the
sheer pessimism surrounding Hall's depiction of gay life. As a devout Catholic,
it was no coincidence that she named her protagonist after the first Christian
martyr, and ultimately, she has Stephen embrace drastic self-sacrifice in her
love life.
The novel
has been slated, too, for its limited depiction of lesbianism as being so
determinedly butch, it might almost seem a form of heterosexuality. And it's
been called bi-phobic for the way it depicts Mary Llewellyn, who has
relationships with men as well as with Stephen, and misogynistic for the way in
which it denies her any say in her own future. Its descriptions of gay men,
meanwhile, read like crass caricature. There's also its racism and classism,
which can be shocking to encounter in a text that's gone down in literary
history as being so radically progressive.
Pulp
fiction
Nor is
there any getting away from the fact that this is simply not great literature.
The book is long-winded and full of stilted dialogue. Change a few pronouns and
in some ways, it resembles the pulp romances of its era. Writing in The Times
in 2008, Jeanette Winterson didn't mince her words, declaring that "The
Well of Loneliness is one of the worst books yet written".
As with
other banned books, this is a novel whose status is intrinsically linked to its
having been censored. As Professor Laura Doan, who co-edited Palatable Poison:
Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, tells BBC Culture, "In a
way, the function of The Well of Loneliness is to convince you that lesbianism
matters – lesbianism matters so much that the government can ban us and silence
us, and that works very well to put you on the cultural map."
In recent years,
however, discussion of the novel has been turbocharged by fresh debate. This
time, the controversy stems less from its content than from the extent to which
we choose to view it through the lens of 21st-Century gender identity politics.
A woman who dresses like a man, goes by a man's name, and is described as being
"midway between the sexes": could it be that one of the world's most
famous lesbian novels has all along been a trans novel? Whatever you conclude,
there's no denying that this book continues to challenge received beliefs and
to polarise readers, sometimes in ways that not even its author could have
anticipated.
At the age
of 21, Hall came into a substantial sum of money from her father, giving her
the security and freedom to leave home. She's said to have written poems and
songs from the age of three, and in her twenties, published some books of
poetry. She was encouraged by her first long-term lover, amateur singer Mabel
Batten, to try her hand at short stories, and was then persuaded by a publisher
to write a novel. Her first, The Unlit Lamp, was published in 1924. Two years
later, her fourth, Adam's Breed, won a clutch of prizes and sold 27,000 copies
in its first three weeks.
Its success
emboldened her to risk writing The Well of Loneliness. By then, Batten had died
and Hall was in a relationship with Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge. The pair
were as "out" as it was possible to be in 1920s England – a life made
easier, undoubtedly, by the privileges of wealth and class, but there were
furtive elements to their existence all the same. Troubridge supported Hall's
decision to publish The Well, and in the spring of 1928, Hall wrote to her
publisher, Jonathan Cape, to warn him: "I have put my pen at the service
of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world". She
added: "So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted
before in fiction".
Is it
autobiographical? Despite very different childhoods, there are certainly
physical similarities to be spotted between Stephen and her creator: both are
tall and "handsome in a flat, broad-shouldered and slim-flanked
fashion". Stephen is her protagonist's given name – having been convinced
she'd be born a boy, her father decides "Stephen" will work equally
well for a girl – but from her mid-twenties, Hall was known to her intimates as
"John", a nickname given her by Batten. Like Stephen, she wore men's
clothes.
The novel
garnered positive reviews in The Times Literary Supplement and Time and Tide
but no critic was as convinced of its potency as James Douglas, editor of the
Sunday Express. Certain that it would contaminate and corrupt English fiction
(his words), he wrote an article damning it as "unutterable
putrefaction", notoriously declaring: "I would rather give a healthy
boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel". The book should be
withdrawn, he thundered, or else the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks,
must act to suppress it.
On trial
It was
sensationalist journalism but Joynson-Hicks was a man who had even found cause
to object to a revised version of The Book of Common Prayer. He threatened Cape
with criminal proceedings if the book wasn't withdrawn. Cape complied, though
not without first licensing the rights to Pegasus Press, an English language
publisher in France. Inevitably, copies found their way back into Britain and a
trial ensued – with the Home Secretary claiming the novel "supports a
depraved practice and that its tendency is to corrupt, and that it is gravely
detrimental to the public interest".
The
judgements did nothing to dent support for Hall, who appeared in the courtroom
wearing a leather driving coat and Spanish riding hat. She was described by the
Daily Herald as "well-chiselled", and at the conclusion of the
obscenity trial, according to the Daily Express, two women approached her from
the crowd, took her hand and kissed it.
Suppression
would be the making of both the novel and its author's reputation and yet in
the decades since, this supposed Sapphic survival guide has continued to
attract plenty of criticism from diverse quarters. In the 1970s, for instance,
it became the focus of a backlash from Second Wave feminist critics for its
patriarchal worldview. And by 2017, Winterson still hadn't warmed to it –
although she chose it as the book that helped her come out, and argued that
"A book can be bad and still have a place in history". Writing this time
in The Guardian, she asserted: "The Well reads like a misery memoir long
before they were invented. It's the fictional story of Stephen Gordon and her
struggles with the fact that she thinks like, acts like, loves like and wants
to be a man. Radclyffe Hall had no idea that sexuality is a spectrum, not a
binary".
Hall's
beliefs definitely complicate the book's legacy. Contrary to what might be
expected of a pioneering lesbian author, her politics were reactionary at best.
As an expat living in Italy in the lead-up to World War Two, she not only
supported Mussolini's Fascist government, she also supported its censorship –
of books. And if Victorian womanhood wasn't for her, she fully supported it for
others, believing that a woman's place was in the home.
For
Professor Doan, much has changed in terms of how the novel is discussed.
"When you read it today you do feel that there's a lot in it that makes
you feel pretty embarrassed by it," she says, noting that its racism, for
instance, was scarcely talked about even a couple of decades ago.
These days,
she prefers to direct anyone interested in learning more about Hall to Miss
Ogilvy Finds Herself, a short story written in 1926 in preparation for The
Well. This story holds the key to the novel's real meaning, Doan believes.
"To me, that story is about a human who is trapped in the wrong body, has
been designated as a female and doesn't feel like a female and has a fantasy of
becoming a male. There's no desire or love or romance in that story, and it
made me realise that The Well of Loneliness isn't about love between women
either."
Doan says
she was never really convinced that The Well was a lesbian novel. As she
explains, "It would be a better text to think of in the context of trans
history. The publishers would be missing a commercial opportunity right now if
they didn't try to push its cultural meaning to the trans community. If they
want to identify a text that is at the start of the awareness in culture of the
possibility of a trans existence, it's got to be The Well of Loneliness."
Maureen
Duffy takes a different view, seeing Stephen's gender nonconformity as a
function of Hall's discomfort with her own lesbianism. Writing in her
introduction to the most recent Penguin Modern Classics edition, Duffy uses a
pivotal scene from the novel to make her point: defending herself to her
mother, Stephen justifies her sexual intimacy with Angela Crossby by explaining
that she's "never felt like a woman". It's an argument Hall insists
upon, Duffy suggests, "in order to justify her own very active
homosexuality, which she embraced in spite of her espousal of Roman
Catholicism".
It's worth
noting that even readers for whom Hall clearly had a desire, however latent, to
transition, The Well of Loneliness is by no means a straightforward text.
Oliver Radclyffe, the trans author of a forthcoming monograph, Adult Human
Male, changed his surname in homage to Hall. He's written on the website
Electric Literature about how his feelings for the book changed as he undertook
his own journey from Englishwoman raising four children in the Connecticut
suburbs, to femme lesbian, to trans man. As he puts it, "it looked like
Radclyffe Hall had not only been a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal
misogynist with consensually-ambiguous domination issues".
Ultimately,
it isn't possible to know whether or not Hall would have identified as
transgender – a term not coined until much later – and labelling this long-dead
queer person as such is innately problematic. What is certain is that more than
90 years after it was banned, this decidedly flawed piece of literature
continues to make readers think anew. As Doan says, "We're confronting its
complexity, and that can only be a good thing."
The Well of
Loneliness: The book that could corrupt a nation. By Hephzibah Anderson. BBC, November 22, 2022.
I can’t remember
how I happened upon my copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which
is a shame because it’s a first edition. The story in my mind is that it was
sent to me by one of my mother’s friends shortly after I came out, but I’m
pretty sure I first read it while I was still in the closet, so that can’t be
right. Maybe I invented this story because of its narrative advantages; that a
book written by an aristocratic English lesbian might be sent to me from an
English aristocrat trying to endorse my lesbianism sounds like the sort of
story I’d like to be true. I’m not sure that it happened that way, though, and
the English aristocrat in question can’t remember either. She thinks it was The
Price of Salt.
Anyway,
let’s assume for the sake of argument that Lady Fitz-Waterford sent me The Well
of Loneliness as a gift when she heard from my mother that I’d told my husband
I was leaving him for a life of Sapphic love. I didn’t actually have a Sapphic
lover at that point—I was living in the Connecticut suburbs and raising four
children largely on my own, which left me a little short on time—but the
principle of the matter was that I was a lesbian and, as such, would probably
need a companion guide, an instruction manual to show me how to do it properly.
Radclyffe
Hall had been born to a wealthy, respectable British family and so had I; she
grew up in the English countryside and so did I; she was a writer and so was I.
Charitably, I’m going to assume that Lady Fitz-Waterford hadn’t actually read
the book—or its famously depressing ending—and that her intentions had been
supportive, not cautionary.
It’s not a
very good book. At best, the writing is dated. At worst, it’s embarrassingly
mediocre. But its place in history is unique. Up until its publication in 1928,
the English ruling classes had been pretending that sex between women didn’t
happen—in case innocent young girls were corrupted into thinking it might be
fun to try—so the book was banned as soon as it came out. Of course, the furor
surrounding the censorship only served to broadcast across the country that
lesbian sex was very much a thing and paved the way for Djuna Barnes to write
the much better (and more sexually explicit) novel Nightwood, which must have
annoyed the British establishment immensely since it was entirely
counterproductive to their original aim.
But
Nightwood was not the book I read multiple times, nor was Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando, which was published shortly afterward, because I wasn’t looking for
literary excellence; I was looking for answers, and each time I read The Well
of Loneliness I somehow managed to find them.
The first
time I read it I wanted confirmation that the sacrifices I needed to make in
the pursuit of true love would be worth it. I was idealistic and naive, certain
that my internalized homophobia was the only obstacle standing between myself
and eternal happiness; I just needed to figure out how to let go of my past—and
the wealthy, white, heterosexual world in which I’d been living—so I could find
the woman of my dreams. I devoured The Well of Loneliness in one sitting
because I thought it was a book about love and loss, and at the time I felt as
if I might lose everything.
The novel’s
female protagonist—named Stephen in a surprisingly progressive act of
gender-fuckery that I decided not to focus on too closely during that first
reading—also had to leave the familiarity and comfort of her homeland before
she could find true love, since Paris was the only place to be a lesbian in
those days. The book was peppered with longing descriptions of the English
countryside, the loss of which could only be justified by Stephen’s desire to
live openly with her girlfriend Mary. I could totally identify with this. I was
living in self-imposed exile in America, and although I was fully prepared to
sacrifice the English countryside at the altar of my desire for a lesbian
relationship, I wasn’t so single-minded that I couldn’t indulge in a little
sentimental nostalgia now and then.
What I
couldn’t identify with, however, was Stephen’s ludicrous decision at the end of
the book to send Mary back to England in the arms of a man—the slightly
unremarkable Martin—to save her from a life of sexual depravity in Paris. This
felt not only like an act of betrayal, but also one of gross stupidity. Wasn’t
the whole point of the story that true love—specifically perfect, unadulterated
lesbian love—should conquer all? Otherwise why would we be making all these
sacrifices? But I reassured myself that lesbian romances weren’t permitted to
have happy endings until at least the 1950s (hello The Price of Salt), so this
was merely a narrative device that had been designed to rescue the book from
censorship. In real life lesbian love would conquer all. Obviously. I mean, we
are living in the twenty-first century now. We are allowed to love whomever we
choose.
By the
second time I read the book, I had grown a little more discerning. I’d divorced
my husband, ditched most of my cis-het friends, found my queer community, and
was in a complicated relationship with a woman who was sorely testing my faith
in the all-conquering power of lesbian love. Yes, I was irrefutably gay, and
yes, sex with women was unquestionably better than with men, but there was
still something missing. I was looking for something else, something beyond my
lesbian relationship, something that felt more like an identity.
Yes, I was
irrefutably gay, and yes, sex with women was unquestionably better than with
men, but there was still something missing.
Up until
this point I’d presented as femme—due to a second type of internalized phobia
that I wasn’t yet willing to look at—but the more comfortable I got with being
a lesbian, the more certain I was that my internal dynamic was on the male end
of the spectrum. And yet somehow the butch identity didn’t feel right. Memories
surfaced of Stephen’s rakishness, her dandyish wardrobe, and I wondered whether
there might be a way of being a masculine-presenting lesbian that was a little
more foppish, a little less straight-up butch. So I pulled the book back down
from my bookshelf.
I was
surprised this time by how much page space was dedicated to Stephen’s
masculinity, details that I hadn’t noticed the first time. I was looking for
descriptions of the clothes she wore, but what kept jumping off the page at me
were the moments when she seemed confused by her own body. These little
revelations were hidden among the text like Easter eggs, but now they felt more
visceral than the lengthy, angst-ridden passages dedicated to forbidden love.
Stephen spoke of her discomfort about her “hard, boyish forearms,” “the strong
line of her jaw,” which gradually grew into an anxiety she couldn’t name, a
feeling of being lost, “a great sense of incompleteness,” and then, suddenly:
“It’s my face,” she announced, “something’s wrong with my face.”
The
sentence sent a chill down my spine. She’d put words to my feelings, voiced the
thought that surfaced every time I looked in the mirror. From inside my muffled
state of denial, I could hear her trying to acknowledge her own deep-rooted
fear of her emerging masculinity, her powerlessness over a body that seemed to
be trying to turn male against her will.
But for the
most part, the rest of the book—when it wasn’t indulging in exhausting
descriptions of anguished love—concentrated on Stephen’s desire for gender
equality, for a position in society, for the respect of the ruling classes.
There was something uncomfortable about her mimicry of upperclass, old-school
masculinity—I knew men like these from personal experience and I didn’t like
them—but I was interested in her friendship with Martin and her desire for male
companionship, although the ending still annoyed me. I understood that Stephen
had some kind of martyr complex, but the insistence that Martin take her lover
was beginning to look less like an act of grandiose self-sacrifice and more
like an act of overt misogyny. Why hadn’t Mary been allowed any say in the
matter?
It was
around this time that I decided to name myself for the author. I’d just had a
story accepted by the New York Times and I didn’t want to write under a name
bequeathed to me by either my father or my ex-husband (because patriarchy).
Searching in a hurry for something fitting, I’d settled on Radclyffe, not only
because she was an English lesbian, but also because she bore an uncanny
resemblance to my grandmother, whom I had adored. Naming myself Radclyffe
somehow felt like honoring both my grandmother and my lesbianism at the same
time, so Radclyffe I became.
By the
third time I read the book, I was specifically looking for the things I’d been
trying to avoid seeing in the previous readings. I’d addressed my internalized
transphobia and accepted my trans-masculinity, and I wanted to find out whether
in a moment of uncanny foreshadowing—or perhaps subconscious intention—I had
named myself for someone who might also have been trans.
I was aware
that this was a purely theoretical exercise. The difference between butch and
trans is one of self-identification—because there isn’t an objectively defined
line on either side of which cis and trans people fall—and, given that the term
transgender wasn’t coined until 1965, there would be no way to accurately
surmise how Radclyffe Hall might identify today. The only label Stephen applied
to herself was that of “congenital invert,” which appears to conflate sexual
orientation and gender identity, so it’s difficult to extrapolate from the text
how much of her anxiety was related to her masculinity, and how much to her
gayness.
She spoke
of “the terrible nerves of the invert … running like live wires through her
body … causing a constant and ruthless torment,” and how she must “drag this
body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed upon her spirit,” which sounded
suspiciously like gender dysphoria to me, but this described how she felt in
childhood, before she had control over her own presentation. I wanted to see if
I could find evidence of continued discomfort after Stephen’s butch identity
had been actualized; a clue that, like me, identifying as a masculine-presenting
woman—and therefore still technically female—hadn’t been enough to relieve her
gender dysphoria.
But mostly
what I found instead were oblique references to her envy of cis-het
masculinity, most notably through the eyes of her dog, who is unapologetic
about his preference for male company and always somehow manages to make
Stephen feel slightly less than, as if he can smell a whiff of the man about
her but is really only humoring her because he loves her. And I couldn’t
understand how I’d managed to overlook Stephen’s undeniable misogyny for so
long: the superiority, the condescension, the control she exerted over the
women she claimed to love.
Radclyffe
Hall paints Mary as an ingenue—consistently referring to her as “the girl” or
“my child”—enthralled by Stephen’s superior intellect, whose greatest joy is
apparently found in mending Stephen’s clothes, cleaning her house, or hovering
silently by her side at the Parisian artists’ salons. It was all beginning to
feel a little like literary masturbation, as if The Well of Loneliness was an
instruction manual written specifically for Hall’s own partner, Lady Una
Troubridge, who by all accounts took it to heart and became exactly the kind of
“wife” she’d been instructed to be.
I also
wasn’t sure whether my new awareness of—and aversion to—these overtly gendered
roles was the result of my having worked so hard to purge them from my own
life, or a general evolution into a more empathetic, mature human being, or a
side effect of early transition. But I was rubber-necking toxic male behavior
everywhere now—a precautionary act of vigilance against adopting the same as I
became progressively more masculine—so I suspected it was probably a
combination of all three.
And yet, I
still couldn’t make a clear call on Stephen’s gender until in the final
chapters I finally caught a glimpse of something that might speak to a trans
identity. Instead of seeing the dismal ending as a betrayal of true love, as
I’d done the first time, or as an irritating act of martyrdom as I’d done the
second, in this third reading Martin seemed to represent not just the masculine
friendship Stephen craved or the male privilege she envied, but the body she
wanted to become. At the end of the penultimate chapter, when she decides to bequeath
her lover to him, she “found that she was holding his hand.” This strange act
of physical contact now made the transaction seem almost supernatural, as if
Stephen had sensed that in the absence of gender-affirming surgery, her
“incompleteness” could only be resolved by transference into an actual male
body, in this case Martin’s.
I decided
to do some more reading—of her biographies, letters and lesser known stories—to
see if I could bolster this theory. Eventually, I found a short story published
a few years later, in which a female protagonist transforms without warning
into a prehistoric man while exploring a cave on the English coast. In “Miss
Ogilvy Finds Herself,” the author finally seems to rid herself of all
inhibition, exposing a desire for masculinity so extreme that she actually
manifests as a caveman, complete with supplicating, half-naked female. It’s
almost impossible to read this glaringly obvious symbolism as anything other
than a fundamental desire to transition, particularly since she ends the story
by killing off the protagonist’s female body.
So I
finally had an answer, although the research it had taken to get there left me
feeling a little queasy, since it looked like Radclyffe Hall had not only been
a gay rights activist but also a patriarchal misogynist with
consensually-ambiguous domination issues. For a brief moment I wondered how I
could reconcile myself with bearing the name of someone whose views were so
diametrically opposite to mine, until I remembered that ugliness can coexist
with beauty, that good people can do bad things, and that we can’t always judge
the actions of someone in the past based on our own standards in the present,
particularly if that involves devaluing the impact they’ve had on our future.
Because however problematic Hall’s position on women, race, and class might
seem today, she was still a radical progressive in her own time, and her
determination to break through the constraints of her gender not only helped to
build a society in which trans people like me could eventually exist, but also
one in which I could move away from my own unprogressive background with far
greater ease.
As guidebooks
go, The Well of Loneliness was far from perfect, but celebrating its existence
feels more important to me now than dissecting the flaws of its author. The
path from cis-het-presenting to queer or trans isn’t an easy one—I don’t know
anyone who has managed to navigate it without falling into a few holes along
the way—and let’s face it, sometimes we need someone with a bit of bullheaded
persistence to hack through the undergrowth and clear a trail for us, however
clumsily they may do it, however unlikable it might make them. My own history
isn’t exactly unblemished, but if we lived in fear of exposing our faults, then
we’d never write our stories, and the one thing I’m certain of is that more of
our stories need to be heard. And if I can hold some compassion in my heart for
Radclyffe Hall, in all her messy, dysfunctional, human complexity, then maybe I
can remember to do the same for myself.
I Found My
Queer Guidebook in “The Well of Loneliness”. By Oliver Radclyffe. Electric Literature, February 15, 2022.
Radclyffe
Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness was subjected to a vicious campaign of
attack led by the Sunday Express for its depiction of lesbian relationships,
eventually being suppressed and censored in the UK as a piece of “obscene
libel”. But the author’s own papers, which are set to be digitised, reveal the
outpouring of support Hall received from members of the public around the
world, who wrote to thank her for creating, in her heroine Stephen Gordon, a
character with whom they could identify.
Seen today
as a seminal work of gay literature, The Well of Loneliness tells of the
“invert” Stephen Gordon, who realises from a young age that she is attracted to
women, dresses in masculine clothes, and falls in love. Hall, a lesbian
herself, wrote it to “put my pen at the service of some of the most
misunderstood people in the world”. At its raciest, it goes no further than
“she kissed her full on the lips, as a lover”, with a night of passion
described as “that night they were not divided”. It ends with Stephen’s plea:
“Give us also the right to our existence!”
Sunday
Express editor James Douglas led a campaign against the novel, writing in his
paper: “In order to prevent the contamination and corruption of English fiction
it is the duty of the critic to make it impossible for any other novelist to
repeat this outrage. I say deliberately that this novel is not fit to be sold
by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library.” Despite support from
writers including Virginia Woolf and EM Forster, it was banned in the UK until
1949, after Hall’s death. But newly revealed papers from the author’s archive,
which are set to be digitised by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of
Texas alongside those of her partner, the artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge,
show that the novel was also supported by thousands of readers, who wrote to
Hall in outrage at the ban.
“The picture you paint of the poor invert
should make everyone more charitable … No one could finish your book, Miss
Hall, without donning a sword and shield forever in the cause of inverts,”
wrote one reader from the US, where the novel was not withdrawn despite a
challenge, a court declaring it not obscene.
“It has
made me want to live and to go on … I discovered myself in Paris and I dreaded
this thing which I thought abnormal,” wrote another.
In the UK,
an 18-year-old man told Hall he had “experienced many of the terrors of the
invert”, hailing her “truly marvellous but searing book”. Others offered to
send money to help Hall in an appeal against the judgment, or wrote of how the
book changed their perspectives. “At first it repulsed and disgusted, and then
the pathos and beauty of it got me, and if I had it in my power to help those
poor souls I would have offered my services,” wrote a London correspondent.
Dr Steven Macnamara,
who has researched Hall’s papers, said she received “thousands of letters of
support”.
“The
letters demonstrate the public’s awareness that The Well of Loneliness was not
an obscene novel, and that Hall had been unfairly and unjustly treated by the
government and the media. Access to these letters, through the future
digitalisation project, will enhance the importance and understanding of this
groundbreaking novel for Hall’s contemporary readers,” he said.
In one
letter, a married coal miner in Doncaster wrote that he had “marvelled at the
bigoted outlook of so-called ‘thinking men’, who are ashamed to let broader
minded folk than themselves delve into the great sex problems”. The miner
added: “Some day we will wake up, and demand to know ourselves as we profess to
know about everything else.”
The new
project will see more than 38,500 images from Hall and Troubridge’s papers
digitised and made available online in January 2021. Alongside Hall’s notebooks
and drafts for The Well of Loneliness, the archive also includesdiaries,
letters – including around 650 that Hall wrote between 1934 and 1942 to
Evguenia Souline, a Russian émigrée with whom she had an extended affair – and
evidence gathered by Hall’s American lawyer before her obscenity trial in the
US in 1929.
In a
telegram, physician Dr Logan Clendening writes that “it is incredible to the
scientific mind that an honest and sensitive presentation in literary form of a
subject familiar and tragic to every physician should be threatened due to the
pornographic imagination of a censor.”
Ransom
Center director Stephen Enniss said: “The richness and depth of this material
goes well beyond the subsequent censorship and cultural controversies sparked
by The Well of Loneliness.”
Jana Funke,
senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and author of The World and Other
Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall, said the archive also includes early
drafts of The Well of Loneliness, which are “more explicit in their depiction
of lesbian desire and more affirmative regarding the protagonist’s gender
non-conforming identity”. Hall dropped earlier sections from the book “arguably
to try and make the book less scandalous – a strategy that obviously failed,”
said Funke.
One chapter
in an early draft, included in Funke’s book, begins with the protagonist having
sex with a woman during wartime at the frontline. “They spoke very little, for
the darkness was rent by intolerable noise, and by sudden swift flashes that
penetrated even into this darkness between cracks in the war-scarred
brickwork,” wrote Hall. “And something, perhaps this near presence of death,
seemed to quicken their bodies into agonised loving, so that they felt the
throb of their bodies in each separate nerve and muscle and fibre, so that they
ceased to be two poor atoms, and became one transient imperative being, having
reason for neither good nor evil – the primitive, age-blind life force.”
Funke said
that when people read The Well of Loneliness, knowing that it was banned as
obscene in the UK, “they are often surprised and disappointed to find that
there is no explicit sexual content. It was banned simply because it argued
that lesbian sexuality and gender non-conformity should be accepted by
society.”
Hall and
Troubridge, she added, “are internationally recognised as LGBTQ pioneers, and
it is vitally important that audiences around the globe have access to their
papers now and in the future”.
‘It has made me want to live’: public support
for lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall over banned book revealed. By Alison Flood.
The Guardian, January 10, 2019
In July of
1928, three months before the publication of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking
novel Orlando — a classic celebrated as “the longest and most charming love
letter in literature,” which subverted censorship and revolutionized the
politics of same-sex love — the English novelist and poet Radclyffe Hall
(August 12, 1880–October 7, 1943) set into motion a cultural revolution. With
the publication of The Well of Loneliness (public library), the way gender and
sexual identities are formulated and articulated was forever changed.
Hall, born
Marguerite Radclyffe Hall but known to her loved ones as John, was an out
lesbian who dressed in men’s clothes in a society and era when same-sex love
was considered not only immoral but legally punishable. In the spring of 1928,
encouraged by the success of her previous writings, Hall warned her publisher,
Jonathan Cape, that her next book would require a high degree of faith on his
behalf, for she was taking a great personal and cultural risk. “I have put my
pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in
the world,” she wrote to him in a letter cited in Sally Cline’s biography
Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (public library). “So far as I know nothing
of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction,” she added.
Cape, who
also published such literary daredevils as Ian Fleming and James Joyce, was
willing to take the risk. Hall delivered. The manuscript she turned in was a
pioneering inquiry into gender and sexual identity, part social protest against
bigotry and part manifesto for equality.
She made
her heroine, Stephen Gordon, both a lesbian and unambiguously likable: loyal,
tenderhearted, often mistreated, and endowed with what Descartes called
“nobility of soul,” that most admirable of virtues. Stephen was animated by one
central question: “Why am I as I am — and what am I?” It echoed what young Leo
Tolstoy in his diary nearly a century earlier: “This is the entire essence of
life: Who are you? What are you?” For queer people, this question has always been
acutely alive, but especially in eras and cultures where not all answers have
been acceptable. The devastation of that unacceptability is found in the
damning words of Stephen’s mother: “This thing that you are is a sin against
creation.” — words strikingly similar to those with which Oliver Sacks’s mother
broke her son’s heart. Hall’s intention was that her novel would “speak on
behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority” — a minority to which she
herself belonged, rendering the book both deeply political and deeply personal.
Many
initial reviews were favorable. Some lauded Hall’s countercultural bravery. One
reviewer, Vera Brittain, wrote that the novel “can only strengthen the belief
of all honest and courageous persons that there is no problem which is not
better stated frankly than concealed,” and that “persecution and disgusted
ostracism have never saved any difficulty in the world.”
But the
vociferous editor of the Sunday Express, a man named James Douglas, did what
critics — especially self-satisfied male critics — do to this day upon
encountering art they don’t understand or find personally objectionable: He
argued that it was not a work of art but immoral propaganda and wrote that he
“would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than
this novel.” Douglas launched a concerted campaign to suppress the book, which
rose all the way up to Britain’s Home Secretary — a man so conservative that,
in addition to attempting to ban alcohol and nightclubs, he had opposed a revised
version of The Book of Common Prayer.
Despite an outcry by some of the era’s most venerated writers and intellectuals, Douglas’s tireless bullying pushed matters to court and a trial for obscenity began on November 9, 1928. (Lest we forget the gravity of those charges, a generation earlier Oscar Wilde had been sent to prison for his homosexuality under similar charges of obscenity.)
Hall’s
publisher and his team mailed 160 letters to potential witnesses who would be
willing to stand against the censorship. Many never responded. Some gave
unimaginative pretexts for why they couldn’t help. H.G. Wells declined, saying
he was going abroad; he might as well have claimed to be mounting his time
machine. In a letter to her nephew penned eight days before the trial, Virginia
Woolf lamented the collective cowardice behind the litany of excuses:
“Most of our friends are trying to evade the
witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to the
weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins.”
Among the
courageous were fifty-seven esteemed writers and scientists, many of whom were
ready to defend the novel’s social and political function as a call for
equality and freedom, despite doubting its literary merit. Vita Sackville-West
— Woolf’s longtime lover and the inspiration for her own censorship-subverting
queer classic — went to the trial ready to testify. The Bloomsbury set were
particularly troubled on creative grounds. Lytton Starchey, one of Woolf’s
dearest friends and a queer man himself, agreed to take the witness stand, but
not without noting in a letter to E.M. Forster — also a willing witness — that
“the book itself is pretty frightful.”
Woolf
herself was reluctantly willing to be a witness on account of the novel’s political
significance and her contempt for censorship, but dreaded defending what she
considered to be a “pale tepid vapid book which lay damp & slab all about
the court” — writing, in other words, afflicted with the malady of middlebrow.
So when the magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled that writers couldn’t testify
as experts on obscenity, only on art, which wasn’t permitted as evidence, she
was immensely relieved to be dismissed from witness duty.
Woolf
captured the larger significance of the trial in her diary:
“What is
obscenity? What is literature? What is the difference between the subject &
the treatment?”
A week
later, Sir Biron ruled that the novel was obscene, ordering that it be
destroyed and that the defendants pay court costs. The decision was appealed in
a second trial — in which Rudyard Kipling was summoned and never actually used
as a witness — but after deliberating for only five minutes, the five new
magistrates upheld the original decision. Across the Atlantic, Alfred A. Knopf,
who had acquired the American rights, cowered from publishing a book censored
by its country of origin.
In a letter
Woolf co-wrote with to E.M. Forster, she once again captured the grim enormity
of the implications:
“ Novelists
in England have now been forbidden to mention [lesbianism]… Although forbidden
as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? …
Writers produce literature, and they cannot produce great literature until they
have free minds. The free mind has access to all knowledge and speculation of
its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo. A novelist may not wish to treat
any of the subjects mentioned above but the sense that they are prohibited or
prohibitable, that there is a taboo-list, will work on him and will make him alert
and cautious instead of surrendering himself to his creative impulses. And he
will tend to cling to subjects that are officially acceptable, such as murder
and adultery, and to shun anything original lest it lead him into forbidden
areas.”
And yet The
Well of Loneliness made its way into the body of culture. In America, the
publishers Pascal Covici (who would later join Viking and become John
Steinbeck’s fairy godfather) and Donald Friede took a $10,000 bank loan —
around $137,000 in today’s money — in order to purchase the rights from Cape.
They enlisted the help of Morris Ernst, founder of the American Civil Liberties
Union, and set about defending the book against censorship. To protect
booksellers from being targeted, Friede reached out to the head of the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice and offered to sell him a copy of the book
directly. But even before Friede and Covici were taken to court, the book sold
more than 100,000 copies in its first year — despite its price point at $5, twofold
the average for fiction, proving Neil Gaiman’s insistence that “repressing
ideas spreads ideas.”
Eventually,
the NYPD invaded the publisher’s New York offices and confiscated 865 copies of
the book. But under U.S. federal law, literary merit was allowed as evidence
against changes of obscenity, unlike during the U.K. trial, so Covici and
Friede assembled a formidable roster of writers to stick up for the novel —
including Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and F.
Scott Fitzgerald.
Ernst
argued for the novel’s value as a protest against intolerance and a tool of
social justice. After a series of contentious legal battles, justice prevailed
on August 19, 1929: New York’s Court of Special Sessions ruled that Hall dealt
with “a delicate social problem,” which in itself didn’t violate the law and
therefore merited her novel’s free circulation. All charges were dropped and
Radclyffe Hall went on to become a cultural icon.
As Lillian Faderman writes in her excellent book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (public library), queer women in America came to call Hall “Our Matron Saint” and one mid-century op-ed proposed that the “inelegant word butch” be replaced with clyffe. Today, Hall’s influence can be traced to lesbian icons like Adrienne Rich, Jeanette Winterson, and Audre Lorde, and the cultural significance of her work finds no greater testament than in Lorde’s assertion the “visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”
November 9,
1928: The Trial of Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf’s Exquisite Case for the
Freedom of Speech. By Maria Popova. The Marginalian, November 9, 2016.
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