The Well of Loneliness The Trial in the Margins

In 1928 Radclyffe Hall published a novel about a woman who loved women, and asked the world for nothing but tolerance. Within weeks the Home Secretary had moved against it, the publisher had withdrawn it, and a magistrate had ordered every copy burned.

The Well of Loneliness follows Stephen Gordon from a Worcestershire estate where she was born the wrong kind of daughter, through the ambulance columns of the Western Front, to the bars and salons of Paris, where she finds a life and a love the law will not let her keep.

This edition restores the novel to the storm that met it. Fifty-six short epigraphs, drawn from the press of 1928, open the chapters in the order the case against the book actually unfolded. Reviewers, moralists, magistrates, Bernard Shaw, and Hall herself all speak in these pages, so the controversy builds alongside the story rather than around it as a separate afterword. It closes with Hall's own defense, "Why I Wrote *The Well of Loneliness*," in her words.

Nearly a century later, the arguments made for and against this novel, about obscenity, art, and who gets to tell their own story, remain unsettled. This edition puts the reader back in the room where they were first made.