The Well of Loneliness
Radclyffe Hall
THE WELL OF LONELINESS
With an Introduction by Maureen Duffy
Contents
Introduction by Maureen Duffy
THE WELL OF LONELINESS
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
THE WELL OF LONELINESS
Radclyffe Hall was born in Bournemouth in 1880. Her childhood was an unhappy one: her parents separated when she was a baby, and she had a difficult relationship with her mother, who was sometimes violent. At the age of twenty-one, she inherited her father’s estate and from then on she was free to travel and live as she chose. She studied at King’s College and in Germany, and in 1907 she was introduced to Mabel Batten, an older married woman, at a German spa. They fell in love and subsequently lived together; it was Batten, known as ‘Ladye’, who gave Hall her lifelong nickname of ‘John’. In 1915, she met Ladye’s cousin Una Troubridge, a sculptor who was unhappily married with a daughter. They began a relationship that lasted until Hall’s death in 1943.
Hall wrote several volumes of verse as a young woman, and in 1924 she published her first novel, The Unlit Lamp. In 1928, The Well of Loneliness was published and sparked a furore. It was damned by the editor of The Sunday Express as an ‘outrage’ and the newspaper launched a publicity campaign against it. The book was subsequently prosecuted for obscenity and banned from publication, a decision that was upheld on appeal. It was not republished in the UK until six years after Hall’s death, and has been in print ever since.
Maureen Duffy is a notable contemporary British poet, playwright and novelist. After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in English from King’s College London. She turned to writing full-time as a poet and playwright after being commissioned to produce a screenplay by Granada Television. Her first novel, written at the suggestion of a publisher, That’s How It Was (1962), was published to great acclaim. Her first openly lesbian novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous lesbian Gateways club in London. To date she has published over 30 works, including nine volumes of poetry. Her work has often used Freudian ideas and Greek myth as a framework. Her latest novel, In Times Like These, is published by Jonathan Clowes Ltd.
To Our Three Selves
Introduction
Nineteen twenty-eight was a bumper year for the exploration of sexuality and gender roles in British literature. It was the year of publication for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. The treatment of all three, in their different ways, is a commentary not only on the state of freedom of expression at the time but also on sexual mores and class divisions. While Orlando, Woolf’s time-travelling, gender-bending love letter to the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West, escaped more or less scot-free, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which contravened social mores with its portrayal of the gardener lover of an upper-class lady, was banned from publication in the UK, appearing first in Florence, privately printed, and waiting until 1960 for its full British publication by Penguin, when it was promptly prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Meanwhile The Well of Loneliness was published by Jonathan Cape on 27 July with the first impression already sold out. Flowers and wine arrived in celebration. The Times Literary Supplement and Time and Tide both reviewed it favourably. But on 19 August the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, damned it as an ‘outrage’ and ‘unutterable putrefaction’ with the soon notorious comment: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel’.
In an attempt to ward off further criticism, Cape, expressing his publisher’s right, sent a copy to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, together with the more serious reviews, hoping for his imprimatur. However, Joynson-Hicks immediately demanded the book’s withdrawal under the threat of prosecution. The second impression was already in circulation but, fearing the worst, Cape leased the rights to Pegasus Press in Paris, sending over moulds of the typeface to ensure its continued publication but also its inevitable prosecution since copies were immediately imported into Britain.
What was all the fuss about? Lady Chatterley’s Lover not only broke the niceties of published language by using banned words like ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’, it also had scenes of explicit sex, and, perhaps worst of all, it broke class taboos with its aristocratic mistress and her working-class lover. By contrast, The Well of Loneliness is restrained, almost archaic (in several places Radclyffe Hall uses the word ‘anent’), the sex is only hinted at and the lovers are all respectably middle to upper class, based on Hall’s own background and experience.
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