HALL, Radclyffe The Well of Loneliness

Large 8vo., purple/brown cloth over orange paper-covered boards, spine lettered in black; outer edges untrimmed; pp. [xv], 4-506, [ii]; spine faded, with nicks at head and foot of spine, the lower board cracked along the cloth and along the joint to the final page, but holding; a couple of small scratches; previous typed catalogue description from the American Anthropological Society in New York City to the front paste-down; contemporary owner’s inscription to the ffep; aside from a few pencil marks, internally clean; ‘7120’ stamped to rear endpaper. 

The First Authorised American edition, limited to just 500 handnumbered copies of which 475 were for sale. This copy no. 274. A commentary is provided by Havelock Ellis, in which he writes that “it is the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists to-day”.

Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness is her most infamous and best-known work. It was in her early adulthood that Hall began to find her voice, dressing in men’s fashion and referring to herself as a ‘congenital invert’, a term taken directly from  the writings of Havelock Ellis. She met and fell in love with singer Mabel Batten, and later formed a relationship with Batten’s cousin, Una Troubridge. Hall had begun her writing career in poetry, and had published a series of books with varying success for over 20 years between 1906 and 1926. At the end of that year, she began to write her first work of lesbian fiction, which would later become The Well of Loneliness. The plot follows Stephen Gordon, a masculine lesbian who, like Hall, identifies as an ‘invert’. Despite the lack of sexual content, the book was immediately subject to an obscenity trial, with  James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, famously writing that "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." The British court judged it obscene because of its defence of "unnatural practices between women", and the verdict ordered the immediate destruction of all copies of the book. It was not published again in England until 1949, though in the US it was printed after a lengthy court battle. Happily the trial, if anything, did more to increase awareness surrounding homosexuality than suppress it, and it became known as the first source of information about lesbianism that young people could find. It is now considered to be the predecessor to the golden age of lesbian pulp fiction.      

The American Anthropological Society adds that The Well of Loneliness is “the most striking contribution to English letters since James Joyce’s Ulysses, and because of its suppression in the land of its birth, one of the most discussed books of modern times.” 

A rather scarce, early edition of this highly important banned book. 

SKU: 1800234