For John and Una it seems to have been love at second sight in 1915. They had first met several years before at a house in Chelsea, together with Ladye, but neither had made any impression on the other. When they met again at a house belonging to another of Una’s cousins, however, they were instantly attracted. At the time John was living with Ladye following the death of Ladye’s husband, while Una was deeply unhappy in her marriage and living apart from her husband, Admiral Troubridge, with her daughter. Three months after their meeting, Una and John became lovers. Six months later, Ladye died of a stroke after a quarrel with John about the relationship. Some three years later, Una and her husband agreed a legal separation and John and Una were finally able to move in together.

Throughout this period, John had continued to write songs but failed to find a publisher to take a collection and so, encouraged by Ladye, she turned to short stories. Ladye sent these to a publisher friend, William Heinemann, but although he admired them, he demanded a novel. At first John resisted but, on holiday in Lynton and observing fellow guests at the hotel, she suddenly had the idea for Octopi, which Una wisely retitled The Unlit Lamp. Turned down at first by Heinemann, it was finally published by Cassell in 1924 and established her reputation as a writer. Next came Adam’s Breed. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Femina Vie Heureuse and an American gold medal, sold twenty-seven thousand copies in the first three weeks and was translated into many languages.

Its success was what John had wanted before she felt ready to write the book she had envisaged for some time: Stephen or, as Una later retitled it, The Well of Loneliness. But first she discussed with Una the probable effect on both their lives of such an open portrayal and defence of homosexuality, which, although it was not illegal for women, as it was for men, was nevertheless rejected by society and forced into an invisible, underground and furtive existence in Britain between the wars.

Una’s response was unequivocal. ‘I told her to write what was in her heart, that so far as any effect upon myself was concerned, I was sick to death of ambiguities, and only wished to be known for what I was and to dwell with her in the palace of truth.’

Well-to-do and upper-class, Una and John were able to spend much of their time travelling around, always with a sufficiency of servants, some taken with them, others hired wherever they pitched up, in a series of grand residences in Britain and ‘dear abroad’. France and Italy were particular favourites, and it was in Paris that much of the book was initially written. Una says that in their many visits to Paris, John hadn’t realized that she was ‘absorbing copy’. Their circle of friends included several American expats who found Paris more welcoming to gay women. Among them was Natalie Clifford Barney who, as Una notes, was the model for Valérie Seymour, and her partner, the artist Romaine Brooks. Barney kept a salon in the rue Jacob for over sixty years and was famous for her many lovers including the poet Renée Vivien and Dolly, Oscar Wilde’s niece. Their circle also included the novelists Naomi ‘Micky’ Jacob and Colette.

In spite of being a Catholic country, France, and especially Paris, had long been more hospitable towards homosexuals of both sexes than Protestant Anglo-Saxon capitals. In the book Stephen and her partner Mary visit the city’s gay bars and haunts, where they encounter gay men as well as women. The depiction of the former in The Well of Loneliness shows a distressing – to twenty-first-century sensibilities – attitude of condemnation and caricature. Chief among the male gay characters is Jonathan Brockett, generally supposed to be based on Noel Coward. ‘Stephen was never able to decide whether Jonathan Brockett attracted or repelled her. Brilliant … yet curiously foolish and puerile … and his hands were as white and soft as a woman’s.’ It is in the description of the bar known as Alec’s that Hall’s description of stereotypically shrill, camp male behavior becomes really venomous. The men there have the ‘haunted, tormented eyes of the invert’. Their dancing together Stephen sees as ‘The Dance of Death’. They are heavily bejewelled and fuelled by cocaine: ‘Bereft of all social dignity … abhorred, spat upon … more hopeless than the veriest dregs of creation … drink-sodden, doped’.

The suggestion that Stephen should write something that would explain the real situation and nature of the persecuted ‘invert’ to the ‘happy people who sleep the sleep of the so-called just and righteous’ and who ‘persecute’ the outcasts is made by another character, Adolphe Blanc, described as the ‘gentle and learned Jew’ with the ‘eyes of the Hebrew’, who was based, according to the Life, on Adrien Mirkil, one of the frequenters of Barney Clifford’s salon.

Unusually for the era, Radclyffe Hall shows no trace of the anti-Semitism which, whether open or as an undercurrent, was so prevalent at the time. (As with her portrayal of male homosexuals in the bars, she is less understanding of the British working class in so far as Stephen comes into contact with them, when the prejudices of her class are more in evidence.) Hall’s attitude suggests that she saw Jewishness as innate, and in this respect akin to the desires of the ‘intermediate’ gay woman, whereas for others at the time homosexuality seemed a matter of choice.

It was to the credit of Woolf and other well-known writers that they were prepared to defend the book and the public’s right to read it as soon as the prosecution got under way. Jonathan Cape and the owner of the Pegasus Press, John Holroyd-Reece, were both summoned to show cause why the offending, and offensive, copies should not be destroyed.