The novel chronicles her nascent understanding of differences she's sensed in herself for as long as she can remember – differences dubbed "queer" behind her back. Later, she serves in the ambulance corps during World War One and falls for fellow servicewoman Mary Llewellyn – she from whom Stephen will be "not divided". After Stephen's mother, Lady Anna, finds out and banishes her from the family home, Stephen becomes a writer and travels to Paris, where she's taken under the wing of a lesbian salonnière. In early adulthood, those girlish crushes blossom into a torrid affair with a bored American housewife, Angela Crossby. She weightlifts and refuses to ride side saddle she gets her clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker and longs to cut her hair short and from a young age she's prone to unusually intense feelings for other women. If Lady Chatterley caused a scandal by showing lust to be no respecter of class boundaries, Hall's novel was still more shocking because its protagonist, despite being named Stephen Gordon, is a woman, and her supposedly masculine proclivities extend far beyond her name. The controversy of course stemmed not from what was being done so much as who was doing it with whom. The books that really change the world?
The shocking history of books that were censored Aside from a kiss that is "full on the lips, as a lover", the coyly phrased "that night they were not divided" is as racy as The Well of Loneliness gets.
For all the clasping of hands and flushing of cheeks that fill its nearly 500 pages, this is no Lady Chatterley's Lover.īoth were published in 1928 and subsequently banned, but whereas DH Lawrence described his protagonists' trysts in vocabulary that would still necessitate asterisks here, Hall stops at the bedchamber door. In the case of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, those expectations are decidedly misleading. When a book has been banned on grounds of obscenity, a reader may be forgiven for coming to it with certain expectations.
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