Queer Your Reading List: The Well of Loneliness

Women getting it on. With each other.

Even today, this premise strikes a chord with audiences. Imagine in 1928, when The Well of Loneliness was first published in England and America. Obscenity trials tried to ban the novel. Still the book sold 100,000 copies in its first year on the shelves. The Well was one of the first lesbian novels ever published, written by Radclyffe Hall, an English author and gay lady. The novel tells the story of Stephen Gordon, an English woman living at the turn of the century discovering and coming to terms with her sexuality.