![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The judges who feared the influence of this book on the impressionable young were probably onto something, since a reader’s identification with Stephen tends to obscure the textual evidence that her social isolation is not simply a result of human prejudice. Hall’s central character, Stephen Gordon, has moved generations of young readers who have secretly feared (and hoped) that they too were fundamentally different from everyone else they knew and that they were doomed to be rejected and misunderstood by the shallow philistines around them. Attacked in several courtrooms in 1928–29 for daring to suggest that gender “inversion” and sexual “perversion” should be tolerated, it has been attacked since 1970 by Second Wave feminist critics for its essentialist and patriarchal world-view.Īnd yet, like the martyred writer Oscar Wilde and his œuvre, Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness have had too much influence on GLBT culture for us simply to dismiss them as relics of the past. As the tragic story of a female “invert,” in the language of the time, the novel itself has been dramatically persecuted. ![]() RADCLYFFE HALL’S The Well of Loneliness is the canonical lesbian novel that many people think they know in some sense, it has become a part of queer folk culture. ![]()
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