Their emotions are less their own than their authors, and the atmosphere of the real rural England at which she aims, she does not attain. In Hall’s draft manuscript, Stephen’s companion, Puddle, reads aloud the only negative review of The Furrow:Īs one reads one is filled with a strong conviction that this writer has never really lived in the countryside of which she writes at some length-has never really met such a man as ‘John Sharp’, or such a woman as ‘Alice’. While exploring the Radclyffe Hall archive in the Harry Ransom Center, I discovered that Hall had written some text about The Furrow, which did not end up in the published version of The Well of Loneliness. In a book where the central character is a writer, the reader knows nothing about Stephen’s work, except for the title of one of her novels, The Furrow. Gender and sexuality aside, for me there has always been a nagging silence in The Well. The Well has provoked decades of debate on gender and sexuality, due to Hall’s depiction of a butch lesbian character who spends most of the novel wishing she had been born a man. While twenty-first-century readers may find the story quaint, in 1928 it was groundbreaking fiction because Hall wrote explicitly about same-sex desire and love. The Well tells the story of the masculine female author, Stephen Gordon, coming to terms with her sexuality. Pronounced obscene after a sensational and scandalous court case, it was banned in the United Kingdom until the late 1940s. The English writer Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943) is best known for her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).
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