Hall · 1928
Radclyffe Hall and *The Well of Loneliness*
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.
It is twenty past ten on the morning of Friday the sixteenth of November 1928, in the public gallery on the upper east side of Court Number One of the Bow Street magistrates' court (the Victorian-Gothic courthouse on Bow Street opposite the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden), in pale November light through the high east windows. She is forty-eight years old. She is Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, born at Sunny Lawn on West Cliff in Bournemouth on the twelfth of August 1880, schooled at King's College London and Dresden Conservatoire, in her fifteenth year of partnership with Una, Lady Troubridge (the daughter of Captain Henry Taylor RN and the former wife of Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge), in her public-personal style of dressing in the male-style cut-tweed-trouser-suit-with-a-white-shirt-and-monocle that has been her public-presentation since about 1915.
On the public bench beside her are Una (forty-one, in a quieter black-skirt-and-jacket), Vita Sackville-West (thirty-six, the novelist; her own Orlando had been published by the Hogarth Press on the eleventh of October, six weeks earlier, and was on the bookshop tables at the moment of Hall's hearing), and the Cape editor Wren Howard. On the bench in the counsel's-table area are the defence team of Norman Birkett KC (the junior; the leader Patrick Hastings had withdrawn the previous week after a personal disagreement with the DPP) and the defence solicitor.
The prosecution case had run on the ninth-and-tenth of November. Biron's judgement reading begins at half past ten. She thinks: Biron has, on the twenty-five-minute opening, set the framework of his judgement against me. The framework is that the question is not whether The Well of Loneliness is literature, but whether it is obscene. The Hicklin test of the 1857 Act asks whether the publication has a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences. The judgement is going against the book.
She thinks: the defence witnesses (Forster, Woolf, twenty-two of the literary establishment) were refused leave to testify on Wednesday morning. The refusal turned the case from a literary question into a magistrate's-private-judgement question. The magistrate's private judgement is, on the visible evidence of the courtroom, not going to support the book.
She thinks: the book has, in its twenty-week life since publication on the twenty-seventh of July, sold about twelve thousand copies in the UK and is, by the Doubleday US edition of November, on sale in North America. The banning here will not stop the book from circulating; the American edition will be smuggled in by sympathetic readers for the next twenty years.
She thinks: the political effect of the prosecution is, in plain reading, the opposite of the DPP's intention. The DPP wanted to suppress the discussion of female homosexuality in the English novel. The prosecution has produced the most-publicised debate on female homosexuality in British public life since 1885. The question is, on the public-record, now in the air it had not been in before the DPP filed.
Biron read his judgement at twenty past eleven. The ruling found that The Well of Loneliness was an obscene libel under the 1857 Act, ordered the destruction of all copies seized by the Metropolitan Police in the August raids on the publisher and the three-London bookshops, and dismissed the Cape application for the return of the confiscated stock. The defence appealed; the appeal was dismissed by Sir Robert Wallace at Bow Street on the fourteenth of December 1928. The book was effectively banned in Britain.
The Well of Loneliness circulated in the Paris-Pegasus-Press edition (published by Pegasus Press in November 1928 and smuggled into Britain through Channel-crossings, and an estimated 100,000 copies sold in this manner over the next decade), in the American Covici-Friede edition (which Doubleday took over in 1929 after Covici-Friede's own prosecution and 1929 acquittal at the New York Court of Special Sessions), and in the French and German translations from 1929 onward. The book was reprinted in Britain by Falcon Press in 1949 in the post-war moment of decline of the Obscene Publications Act prosecutions; the 1949 reprint was not prosecuted by the DPP, on a private legal opinion that the 1928 conviction would not be sustained in a 1949 retrial.
Radclyffe Hall died at her London home in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, on the seventh of October 1943, sixty-three years old, of cancer. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery (West Side), in the tomb she had built with Una Troubridge for them both; Una was buried beside her in 1963. The tomb-inscription, by her own pre-arrangement, is the closing line of the final chapter of The Well of Loneliness: and our love has been blessed by God. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 (which decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales) did not extend to lesbian relationships, which had never been formally criminalised in English law. The novel, by every careful judgment of late-twentieth-century lesbian-literary criticism (Sally Cline, Diana Souhami, Laura Doan), is the foundational text of the twentieth-century lesbian literary tradition.