The Well of Loneliness

January 4, 2005 | Literature

PlanetOut has a story about the mostly unknown persecution of Radclyffe Hall, author of the famous queer novel The Well of Loneliness. The 1920s book painted “inverts” (lesbians) as oppressed and misunderstood, and it wasn’t published until 1949 after having been smuggled from Britain to France.

Posted by meredith @ 5:09 pm | Leave a Comment »   

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1. Zille Says:
   

   Neil Gaiman just wrote this in his blog:

   In this article from the Guardian about the attempts to ban The Well of Loneliness, absolutely everyone has the kind of names I only seem to encounter in period plays. It was wonderful to discover that:

   Radclyffe Hall, a flamboyant lesbian, wrote The Well of Loneliness to ‘put my pen at the service of some of the most misunderstood people in the world’. She attended the trial in November 1928 dressed in a leather driving coat and Spanish riding hat. Sir Chartres Biron, the chief magistrate at Bow Street, ruled that the novel was an ‘obscene libel’ and all copies should be destroyed. Its publisher, Jonathan Cape, launched an appeal which proved abortive.

   Documents show how Sir Archibald Bodkin, Director of Public Prosecutions, feared that the publisher would mobilise eminent writers to defend the book. He wrote to several doctors asking for a clinical analysis of what he called ‘homo-sexualists’. In a letter to one of them, Sir Farquhar Buzzard, he explained: ‘I want to be able to call some gentleman of undoubted knowledge, experience and position who could inform the court of the results to those unfortunate women (as I deem them) who have proclivities towards lesbianism, or those wicked women (as I deem them) who voluntarily indulge in these practices - results destructive morally, physically and even perhaps mentally.’

   They make today’s names seem so very bland. Sir Farquhar Buzzard, Sir Archibald Bodkin…

   Meanwhile this news story is, in some ways, amazingly familiar — I’ve seen several films, and read a number of books and stories, where the plot is “someone writes a scandalous book set in a village, in which thinly-disguised locals are lusty”. I think my favourite thing about the real-life version is that the author only sold six copies and is now refusing to sell the other 494 copies of his self-published tome.

   January 5th, 2005 at 8:50 pm

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