The Well of Loneliness published
January 1928
The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the English author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of a woman whose ‘sexual inversion’ is apparent from an early age. She finds love while serving as an ambulance driver in World War 1 but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as having a debilitating effect on inverts, the term she uses for homosexuals. The novel portrays inversion as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: "Give us also the right to our existence".The Well of Loneliness became the target of a campaign by the editor of the Sunday Express. Although its only sex scene consists of the words "and that night, they were not divided", a British court judged it obscene. The publicity increased lesbian visibility and for decades it was the best-known lesbian novel in English, and often the first source of information about lesbianism that young lesbians could find.
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