After the success of The Unlit Lamp, which won the Prix Femina, and Adam's Breed, which won the James Tait Black prize for the best literary novel of 1926, Hall felt confident enough to enlist Troubridge's support for a novel about inversion. Her stated purpose was to present a sympathetic portrait of the "congenital invert," one that would show the full humanity and suffering of women like herself.

Sponsor Message.

The protagonist, Stephen Gordon, is not a veiled self-portrait, but rather a fictionalized version of Havelock Ellis's description of the true or born invert, pushed almost to the extreme. Stephen's childhood and adolescence are marked by difference, both in her "boyish" pursuits and in her attraction to women and aversion to romantic and sexual intimacy with men.

Loathed by her mother, understood but unprotected by her father, Stephen is ultimately exiled from her beloved country estate and flees to Paris and the relative acceptance of the lesbian circles there (modeled after Natalie Barney and her salon).

Like Miss Ogilvy, Stephen is temporarily fulfilled by the demands of World War I and her role as ambulance driver and by her love for another driver, Mary Llewellyn. This love sustains Stephen and Mary for several years but founders on Mary's attraction to Martin Hallam. Stephen orchestrates her own martyrdom to free Mary for a union with Martin.

The Obscenity Trial

The public outcry came swiftly. Hall's effectiveness in engaging the reader's sympathy and understanding alarmed the conservative moralists who succeeded in bringing the publisher before the Home Office in a highly publicized obscenity trial.

Hall's own defense of the book's morality cited Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld, another noted sexologist, claiming that inverts are a part of Nature, made that way by God, and then punished by a cruel and uncomprehending world. Their suffering cries out for redress and an end to persecution.

She claimed also that The Well upholds conventional heterosexual morality. Only true inverts should live as Stephen cannot help living. No matter how much Mary Llewellyn may have loved Stephen, she is not a true invert and must therefore follow her own true (heterosexual) nature. This was a bold and powerful message in the literary world of the 1920s.

Nevertheless, the book was banned, though printed in France and thus widely available. The attempt to ban it in the United States having failed, American readers were able to purchase it freely. From these sources alone, The Well sold over 10,000 copies in its first year.

Over the years, Hall claimed to have received more than 10,000 letters about the novel, many from grateful lesbians, but also many from nonlesbian supporters. By 1943, at Hall's death, the book had been translated into fourteen languages and was selling at over 100,000 copies year after year. It has never gone out of print.

Despite the shifting critical reactions over three-quarters of a century, and despite Hall's "essentialist" turn-of-the-twentieth-century views on sexology, The Well of Loneliness remains the one book most likely to have been read by lesbians and by those interested in a portrayal of lesbianism. Indeed it is one of the books most widely identified with lesbian literature the world over.

It is impossible to understand twentieth-century lesbian literature without recognizing the significance of butch-femme relationships.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The centrality of gay and lesbian bars to glbtq culture has been reduced in recent years, but they continue to fulfill important functions; and, in many areas, they remain the most visible manifestation of glbtq presence.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Twentieth-century efforts to reform British law and public opinions about homosexuality met with mixed results, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United Kingdom has emerged as a leader in recognizing the rights of its glbtq citizens.

In addition to being the muse and inspiration of other writers, American expatriate Natalie Barney, known as the Amazon, was a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist in her own right.

The female nudes and portraits of cross-dressed women made American artist Romaine Brooks's lesbian identity known to the world.

Henry Havelock Ellis--British psychologist and writer--was one of the first modern thinkers to challenge Victorian taboos against the frank and objective discussion of sex.

Members of New York's early twentieth-century avant-garde, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are also the authors of a widely suppressed and largely unread experimental novel of 1930s gay life, The Young and Evil.

German-born Magnus Hirschfeld deserves recognition as a significant theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation of his time.

The Legacy Walk in Chicago is an outdoor history museum that reclaims and celebrates glbtq contributions to world history and culture.