Hall

On the morning of the sixteenth of November 1928, in Court Number One of the Bow Street magistrates' court in central London, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, forty-eight years old, the Bournemouth-born novelist and poet known to her literary friends as John, sat with her partner Una, Lady Troubridge, in the public gallery as the magistrate Sir Chartres Biron read out his judgement in Director of Public Prosecutions v Jonathan Cape, Limited. Cape was the publisher of Hall's fifth novel The Well of Loneliness, published on the twenty-seventh of July 1928, the first English-language novel to take the romantic life of a self-described lesbian (the protagonist Stephen Gordon) as its central subject and to argue, in the closing pages, for the legal-and-moral toleration of the same. The Sunday Express editor James Douglas had attacked the book in his nineteenth-of-August leading-article (A Book That Must Be Suppressed) with the line I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. The Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Archibald Bodkin moved against the book under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act on the twenty-second of August. Biron, on the sixteenth of November, ruled the book an obscene libel and ordered all copies destroyed. The defence witnesses (E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Leonard Woolf, and twenty-two others) had been refused leave to testify on the grounds that no expert on questions of literature is qualified to give expert evidence on a question of obscenity. The book was effectively banned in Britain until 1949, when it was reprinted by Falcon Press; the ban was never formally lifted, and the 1949 reprint was, on a private legal opinion, not prosecuted. The Well of Loneliness has been continuously in print in English since.

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