The Well of Loneliness
- ISBN-10
- 1090862520
- ISBN-13
- 9781090862525
- Series
- The Well of Loneliness
- Pages
- 445
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2019-03-18
- Publisher
- Independently Published
- Author
- Radclyff Hall
Description
The lesbian protagonist of this novel, Stephen Gordon, fails to find love and understanding. After a series of rejections, her "inversion" is revealed to her mother, who orders her to leave her home. While serving in an all-woman ambulance corps during World War I, Stephen falls in love with Mary Llewellyn. Mary, however, later marries a man who had been Stephen's childhood friend.Radclyffe "John" Hall considered herself an active or "congenital invert." Believing in sexologist Havelock Ellis' theories that "inverts" were biologically determined, Hall used scientific and medical concepts of inversion in literary discourse to discuss homosexuality outside the realm of morality.Hall describes The Well of Loneliness as "The first long and very serious novel entirely upon the subject of sexual inversion" She wrote The Well of Loneliness in part to popularise the ideas of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who regarded homosexuality as an inborn and unalterable
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Other editions
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- 1990-10-18
- - pages
- Paperback
- National Geographic Books