Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness, which was banned in Britain in 1928 for defending love between women, and the trial made it the most famous lesbian novel of the century. She was born Marguerite, called herself John, inherited money from an absent father at twenty-one and never had to work. She wore men's clothing, cropped her hair, and lived with Mabel Batten and then, for the rest of her life, with Una Troubridge. The Well is not an explicit book - the most it says of a night together is that they were not divided - but it argues that its protagonist Stephen Gordon is a congenital invert who did not choose and should not be punished, and it ends with a plea to God for the right to exist. That plea is what could not be permitted. The Sunday Express said it would rather give a healthy boy prussic acid than this novel; the home secretary pressed the publisher, and a magistrate ordered the book destroyed as obscene without hearing the forty writers who had come to defend it, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster among them. It stayed banned in Britain until 1949. The American edition was prosecuted and won. Hall's own politics were reactionary and she flirted with fascism, and the sexological framing of inversion as a defect has made the book uncomfortable for later readers - but it was for decades the only book many women could find. She and Una Troubridge are buried together at Highgate. The trial judge was the same magistrate who had sat on the Bloomsbury obscenity cases. Jonathan Cape had sent the book to the home secretary himself, hoping for approval.

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