The author and the publishers were not themselves prosecuted, nor was Radclyffe Hall able to give evidence for the defence. Owners of copies and the premises where they were seized were prosecuted.

Holroyd-Reece engaged the long-standing firm of Rubinstein, Nash & Co. to defend the book, and its young proprietor Harold Rubenstein managed to solicit support not only from the Woolfs but also from E. M. Forster, A. P. Herbert, Lawrence Housman, Julian Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Rudyard Kipling and, unsurprisingly, Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. The young defending counsel was Norman Birkett, later to become Lord Chief Justice, and the trial at Bow Street Magistrates began on 9 November. There were over forty witnesses for the defence present but the presiding magistrate, Sir Charles Biron, refused to call any of them. On 16 November, after a week’s adjournment, he condemned the book for failing to censure the life of ‘filthy sin’ and ‘horrible tendencies’.

John shouted from where she was sitting with the defence counsel, ‘I emphatically protest!’

SIR CHARLES: ‘I must ask you to be quiet.’

JOHN: ‘I am the author of this book …’

SIR CHARLES: ‘If you cannot behave yourself in court, I shall have you removed.’

JOHN: ‘Shame!’

The book was declared obscene and ordered to be destroyed. John appealed and the case was heard at the London Quarter Sessions where, after retiring for only ten minutes, the magistrates pronounced the book to have ‘a tendency to deprave and corrupt’ and dismissed the appeal. To his great credit, Kipling sat behind the defence counsel, and Marie Stopes was also present. The subsequent publicity did the book no harm. Supporters mobbed John outside the court, along with the press. Two young women kissed her hand. Meanwhile a subsidiary of Cape, Cape-Ballon, brought out the book in America. It was prosecuted in early 1929 but, unlike in Britain, was acquitted. Nevertheless, John was left with so large a bill for legal expenses that she was forced to sell her London house.

Letters of support and requests for John to lecture continued for many years, and on her and Una’s next visit to Paris, they found the book on sale everywhere, with photographs of John in bookshop windows. It was not to be republished in Britain until 1954, followed by Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, which was exonerated in court under the new Obscene Publications Act.

In his long summing-up, Sir Charles Biron had singled out one particular section of the novel as being representative of ‘horrible tendencies’, ‘filthy sin’ and ‘moral and physical degradation’ – that dealing with the Great War and Stephen’s experiences as a member of the fictional London Ambulance Column. As well as an endorsement by Havelock Ellis, emphasizing the novel’s ‘notable psychological and sociological significance … and complete absence of offence’, the book includes an author’s note in which she makes it clear that the ‘unit … has never had any existence except in the author’s imagination.’ Nevertheless Biron chose to specifically mention ‘suggestions’ in the novel made against a woman’s ambulance unit at the front. It was this which apparently provoked John’s outburst.

During the war, John herself had done voluntary work at St Thomas’s Hospital and serving in a canteen. However, she seems to have written her account of a women’s ambulance unit serving in France based on the experiences of Toupie Lowther, co-commander of the only such unit, who was later to allege that Hall had not only plagiarized her experiences for the book, but that the character of Stephen was itself based on her. Lowther was a tennis champion, an expert fencer and friend of Romaine Brooks. The all-female team which she organized as the Hackett–Lowther unit had twenty cars and between twenty and thirty women drivers, operating near Compiègne. Like Stephen, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and it is altogether probable that something of her life and character fused with John’s own in the writing of The Well. It is here that Stephen and Mary, her co-driver, begin their relationship which in some respects, though crucially not all, mirrors John and Una’s. Despite Biron’s condemnation, this episode stands as one of the most interesting and, from a literary point of view, successful episodes of the book.

In literary form The Well of Loneliness belongs to a species of novel to be superseded by radio and television, and to that first half of the century when readers sought their entertainment in fiction often through libraries, either public or the commercial lending libraries such as those run by Boots. They wanted a ‘good read’, something ‘to take you out of yourself’, and this was largely provided by romance or crime. Of these two major categories, crime from the period has survived best while the professional writers of so-called ‘middlebrow’ fiction are largely forgotten. Who now reads Berta Ruck, Michael Arlen, Marie Corelli or Naomi Jacob except as part of a dissertation on the evolution of popular culture? Boy meets girl, boy loses girl (or with the genders reversed), followed by a happy ending: that was the common romance formula, and one which The Well itself follows, except with the crucial variation of ‘girl meets girl, girl loses girl’.

What makes The Well a landmark publication and has ensured its continued readership where other novels from the 1920s have disappeared without trace is its open and forthright setting in a gay female world within ‘normal society’, its refusal to condemn and its unmistakable demand for equal treatment.