The Well of Loneliness

‘I want you to learn to make friends of your books; some day you may need them, because—’ He hesitated, ‘because you mayn’t find life at all easy, we none of us do, and books are good friends.’

As one of the earliest and most publicized lesbian novels, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness has been dissected almost to the point of its death. It’s often been analyzed as medicine, not literature, with its ingredients and effects debated for their potential to kill or cure. Is it too dour and hopeless in its tragedy, or, in the context of its time, was its unhappy ending a bitterly necessary alarm to its mainstream audience? What harm came from Hall portraying the queer community as more sewer than solace? Is the book unfair to femme lesbians and bisexuals? How do its ideas about “sexual inversion” read in light of more current interpretations of gender and sexuality?

It’s to the novel’s credit that, after all this, it retains a heartbeat.

The Well of Loneliness is a revealing historical artifact, to be fair. If you have any interest in early twentieth century takes on queer sexuality, this is a key fictional text. After all, like a lot of pioneers in frank literary representation, Hall has to spell out her ideas at some length: she’s starting up a conversation with a public world that has, for years, given her and hers little but silence and shunning, so damn right, she’s going to be talky. She has to have both sides of the discussion, to assemble a thorough argument she hopes will get through. It’s awkward, sure, but it’s also a plaintive, moving attempt to be heard and understood.

But there’s more to The Well of Loneliness than that. At its core—and despite its 1928 publication date—this is effectively a Victorian novel, an up-close study of one character’s path through life, complete with an artistic coming-of-age and a few would-be marriage plots. It’s as much David Copperfield as it is Brokeback Mountain.¹

It’s an unsatisfying romance, and since the central loss is romantic, that helps make it a lackluster tragedy, too. But it works well as a thoughtful, thorough character study that has a well-developed sense of empathy² for its flawed cast.

I suspect this old-fashioned approach may, in a sneaky way, have had more of an impact than Hall’s philosophizing and reach for pathos. It affirms that Stephen Gordon, for all her oddness and inversion, is still a person, one whose history and habits can be written about like any other’s. If you plod through someone’s life like this, sentence by sentence, you know her. Stephen becomes real and familiar, not an abstraction to be demonized or dismissed. Narrative outlasts arguments.

It’s a shame, then, that so much of Hall’s narrative gets lost when the book is boiled down to an assessment of its qualities as both primer and polemic. In fact, The Well of Loneliness is at its best before it hits its most famous sections: Stephen as a child and a young woman is more finely drawn, and conveyed with more textured emotion, than Stephen as a WWI ambulance driver and tragic lover.

Hall seems to sense that, too, because the novel spends a great deal of time in Stephen’s childhood. Her parents, Sir Phillip and Lady Anna, named her for the boy they expected, and Stephen came out classically boyish—tall, wide-shouldered, and strong-featured, much more like her father than her mother. (Inversion was seen as a kind of mismatched gender and assigned sex, with physically and spiritually “masculine” traits innately appearing in some girls, or vice-versa.) She grows up playing at being Lord Nelson, dashing and heroic. She gets a passionate crush on a housemaid, Collins, which Hall renders in satisfyingly weird fashion:

Collins rolled down a coarse woollen stocking and displayed the afflicted member; it was blotchy and swollen and far from attractive, but Stephen’s eyes filled with quick, anxious tears as she touched the knee with her finger.

‘There now!’ exclaimed Collins, ‘See that dent? That’s the water!’ And she added: ‘It’s so painful it fair makes me sick. It all comes from polishing them floors, Miss Stephen; I didn’t ought to polish them floors.’

Stephen said gravely: ‘I do wish I’d got it—I wish I’d got your housemaid’s knee, Collins, ’cause that way I could bear it instead of you. I’d like to be awfully hurt for you, Collins, the way that Jesus was hurt for sinners. Suppose I pray hard, don’t you think I might catch it? Or supposing I rub my knee against yours?’

…

Stephen prayed in good earnest—with such fervour, indeed, that she dripped perspiration in a veritable orgy of prayer.

‘Please, Jesus, give me a housemaid’s knee instead of Collins—do, do, Lord Jesus. Please, Jesus, I would like to bear all Collins’ pain the way You did, and I don’t want any angels! I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus—I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins—I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were; please, dear Lord Jesus, do let me. Please give me a knee that’s all full of water, so that I can have Collins’ operation. I want to have it instead of her, ’cause she’s frightened—I’m not a bit frightened!’

This petition she repeated until she fell asleep, to dream that in some queer way she was Jesus, and that Collins was kneeling and kissing her hand, because she, Stephen, had managed to cure her by cutting off her knee with a bone paper-knife and grafting it on to her own. The dream was a mixture of rapture and discomfort, and it stayed quite a long time with Stephen.

This is how Stephen will be with love all her life: fervent, self-sacrificing, and incapable of a happy medium. There’s comedy to it when she’s a child, as she is here, but Hall comes back to this urgent, feverish passion over and over again, letting each incident of it accumulate more severity.

This childhood section also paints Stephen’s relationship with her parents, a major factor in the novel. Sir Phillip senses her difference early—we find out later that he has Krafft-Ebing’s work on sexuality in his library and has made notes on her in it; I find it mildly endearing that Hall cites her sources so blatantly—and responds to it with both cowardice (he can’t bring himself to discuss it with his wife when he knows it will disappoint and shame her) and compassion (he leans into Stephen’s “boyish” interests and encourages all the skills and tastes he thinks will give her a happy life). Lady Anna senses it too, but not so explicitly. All she can tell is that her daughter, to her eyes, is “wrong,” a kind of lesser parody of her beloved husband. She wants to care for Stephen, and she feels guilty for not managing it more often. The complicated, tepid, damaging love between mother and daughter will haunt the whole back half of the book. By zeroing in on a difficult family triangle where each character, however weak or wrong, is portrayed as human, Hall crafts a psychological realism that is literature first and essay second.

Stephen also gets interests and avocations unrelated to, though still affected by, her queerness. She becomes an author, and Hall cares about both her inspirations and the mundane difficulties of her sophomore slump. She’s also a gifted rider, and her close relationship with her beloved horse, Raftery, is maybe the most poignant and beautifully written part of the book. If you don’t like sad stories, and you were originally going to avoid this book because of the heteronormative break-up at the end, I have news! You may also want to avoid it because Raftery goes into an unhappy decline in his later years, and Stephen eventually has to shoot him in the head! Not every tragic lesbian novel also offers you the heartbreak of a Newbery Award-winning animal tale. I’m trying to make a joke out of this, but I cried, and I’m about to start crying again now thinking about it.

The book is at its best when Hall is able to let all these traits affect each other, as in a fox-hunting scene set after Sir Phillip’s death robs his daughter of her main sense of support and companionship. Stephen comes to feel more like the confused, beaten-down prey than the valiant pursuer:

Then Stephen saw something just ahead, and it moved. Checking Raftery sharply she stared at the thing. A crawling, bedraggled streak of red fur, with tongue lolling, with agonized lungs filled to bursting, with the desperate eyes of the hopelessly pursued, bright with terror and glancing now this way now that as though looking for something; and the thought came to Stephen: ‘It’s looking for God Who made it.’

Stephen’s confused sense of her own nature has just collided with her grief over her father, and her ensuing decision—that she and Raftery will never go fox-hunting anymore, no matter how joyful and triumphant it once felt—will have complicated ramifications. Raftery suffers from the loss of the hunt (as he’ll also suffer when Stephen takes him with her in exile from her country home); a supporting character is bewildered and hurt by Stephen’s sudden abstention; Stephen herself is losing, thread by thread, the ties that bind her to the world she loves, the world of country squires and people who feel normal and secure. It’s a moving sequence in its own right, but the way it springs from and echoes to everything else—even her final theological plea—makes it one of the best in the book.

Eventually, the adult Stephen falls in love, and as shallow as the first affair is, it’s still real enough to have devastating consequences. Hall does some of her best dramatic writing in that section, endowing multiple characters with enough solidity to make even their most selfish and destructive choices feel real and sympathetic. (She also pulls off the neat novelistic trick of imbuing some characters, like governess Puddle, with more depth and complexity than Stephen herself ever realizes. Hall’s prose can be clunky or overwritten, but her instincts and perspective make up for it.) The heightened melodrama of betrayal and banishment are involving, and they work to serve Hall’s overall point: how unfair it is that Stephen is made to pay such a steep price for a misstep that would be, and is, greeted with a shrug when a man is involved.

The Well of Loneliness gets remembered—and often criticized—for everything that happens after all this: Stephen’s romance with Mary Llewellyn, their unhappiness at being forced into exclusively queer circles in Paris, and, finally, her decision to give Mary up to a male love interest to “rescue” her from an abnormal life. Those last sections have their virtues as well as their flaws, but they feel less structured and resonant than Stephen’s salad days. The most famous part of the novel is actually its least novelistic, and that’s a shame.

I opened with a quote where Sir Phillip tells Stephen that she should learn to make friends with books. He knows, though he can’t bring himself to say, that friends may be in short supply elsewhere. When The Well of Loneliness turns to dealing more exclusively with love, it’s not all that convincing. But its sturdiness and nuanced, polyphonic study of its world and characters make much of it feel companionable. This book could still be a friend.

1. Both The Well of Loneliness and Brokeback Mountain, specifically, share a concern with the plight of queer people who aren’t innately city people, whose sense of comfort and safety are permanently at odds. ↩︎
2. The single worst moment comes when Hall’s typically expansive empathy fails: there’s a line here about a Black character that is just plain vile with its faux-understanding, “more in sorrow than in anger” racist horseshit. ↩︎