It's incredible to discover that less than a hundred years ago in 1928 James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express, wrote an article calling for a ban of “The Well of Loneliness” stating: “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.” His campaign successfully led to the book being formally banned in Britain because of its representation of homosexuality as being a natural facet of identity and it wasn't made legally available again in this country until 1949.
This is the first time I've read this classic novel. I can only imagine what it would have meant to a gay person early in the 20th century to read it and discover a kinship of feeling – not just for the book's portrayal of female protagonist Stephen Gordon's emotional and sexual closeness to people of the same gender or Stephen's desire to dress in more masculine clothes – but the overwhelming sense it gives of being made to feel different and wrong for your very existence. The first section of the book describes Stephen's coming of age and feeling continuously frustrated “for she did not know the meaning of herself.” Nor does she have language available to describe her difference. Those that seem to understand her queerness (even her own father) refuse to name it so for many years her estrangement and isolation is felt all the more intensely.
Of course, to me and any sensitive or queer person who read it at the time of publication, it's perfectly obvious what Stephen is. Her early passionate crush on a beautiful maid and misguided affair with a married American woman are so touchingly portrayed because they are expressions of longing which can never be fulfilled in a satisfying way – not just because Stephen's feelings can't be equally reciprocated but because there's a fundamental miscommunication of desire. What's wonderful is that over the course of the novel Stephen discovers the words with which to describe herself and this leads to her liberation. She eventually labels herself as an invert. What's more, after being exiled from the stately home of her birth and meeting a woman she falls in love with while working for an ambulance unit during WWI, she discovers a community of similarly queer individuals while living in Paris. Yet, even though there is a group of people with codes and behaviour which loosely groups them together as inverts, their venues and meetings are kept in the shadows. That their community remains furtive and largely unacknowledged means that Stephen's feelings of isolation and estrangement will persist no matter what personal and private fulfilment she achieves.
It's quite moving how the ending of the novel is a rallying call where Stephen's voice joins with “millions” to demand “Give us also the right to our existence!” It's undoubtably a novel with a political message which Sir Charles Biron, the chief magistrate overseeing the book's trial in November 1928 described as “a passionate and almost hysterical plea for the toleration and recognition of these people”. So it wasn't just a worry that the novel might “corrupt those into whose hands it should fall” but that it will motivate queer people and people sympathetic to queer expression to campaign for legislation which will protect queer rights. Though Radclyffe Hall insisted the novel should be circulated simply because of its literary merit, the Bloomsbury Group who actively campaigned for its publication and the courts which ordered “it to be destroyed” openly acknowledged the stakes involved.
That this novel should still survive as both a document of this societal divide and a richly immersive story in itself is wonderful and it should quite rightly stand as a cornerstone of queer literature. Many would argue its political importance has passed and its tragic arc gives a negative representation that true happiness can't ever be found for queer people, but as an individual's journey of self discovery and a query into the lines of gender I think it remains a worthy story. I also found it interesting how the novel's narrative focus occasionally drifts to characters other than Stephen so you can clearly see their point of view. The story even comically focuses at some points on how Stephen's dog David sees the world and view's Stephen's lover as a goddess. Like the protagonist in “Orlando”, Stephen's semi-open expression of queerness is only possible because of her wealth and privilege. I think it's important to acknowledge that it's necessarily limited in this respect as (of course) expressions of queer desire existed amongst every social class so I find it heartening we're now getting new historical novels such as “The Prophets”, “Days Without End”, “White Houses” and “A Place Called Winter” which describe expressions of same sex desire amongst many different levels of society. Despite it being a product of its time, it remains an extremely enjoyable story full of insights and pleasure as it follows Stephen's singular journey.
