The Well Of Loneliness: Virago Modern Classics

Radclyffe Hall, the pen name of Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, was born in Bournemouth on August 12, 1880. She was educated at King's College, London, and later undertook further studies in Germany. Hall was renowned for her open homosexuality, a subject dealt with in her best-known novel,The Well of Loneliness(1928), a semi-autobiographical work and the only one of her eight novels to deal with overt lesbian themes. Her open treatment of lesbianism inThe Well of Lonelinessoccasioned a trial for obscenity; it was banned and an appeal refused, which resulted in all copies in Britain being destroyed. The United States allowed its publication after a long court battle. She also published several volumes of verse includingTwixt Earth and Stars: Poems(1906) andSongs of Three Counties and Other Poems(1913).Adam's Breed(1926), a sensitive novel about the life of a restaurant keeper, won the Prix Femina and the 1927 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Hall died in 1943 at the age of sixty-eight from cancer.