'The Well of Loneliness' and the Gendered Soul

One of those books which is often referenced, but rarely read. Here's my review.

The Well of Loneliness, a work of fiction by Radclyffe Hall, was banned in England via an obscenity trial, after its publication in 1928. This novel is not at all pornographic, and at its most risqué could be described as mildly erotic. This text was banned from distribution because of its depictions of what we would now call gender identity and sexuality, and the effect feared upon young women who might read the book.

The plot of the novel starts at the country house and estate of Morton, in the English county of Worcestershire, during the late Victorian era. Upstanding member of the local gentry Sir Phillip Gordon rides to hounds, which means he hunts foxes on a horse. He is married to Lady Anna Gordon, who is expecting a child. The English upper classes at that time typically practised the Norman custom of primogeniture, in which an estate of land and property is passed in its entirety to the eldest son on the death of the patriarch. Sir Phillip is sure that he will have a son as his first-born child, and so he determines that his son is going to be called Stephen. When Stephen is born, Stephen is female, but this doesn't deter Sir Phillip, who raises the child very much in his own image.

As Stephen grows, she (this pronoun is used throughout the book) rides her horse astride, just like her father, rather than side-saddle as a lady would. This alone is enough to make Stephen strange and controversial among the county set. Stephen also takes a keen interest in fencing (sword fighting, not agricultural), and becomes very proficient. There emerges a very close bond between Stephen and her father, but her mother Lady Anna is disgusted by this child's masculine gender presentation. The relationship between mother and child is strained by mutual animosity throughout the novel. Stephen develops an interest in bodybuilding, swinging dumbbell weights whenever possible. Lady Anna becomes more and more estranged from her masculine child as Stephen grows taller, leaner and stronger.

Anna has no more children, and so Stephen grows up in the fine country house of Morton as an only child. Radclyffe Hall committed in her novel to the idea of gender identity 'inversion' as innate, following the theory of homosexuality promoted by late Victorian 'sexologists', self-appointed experts including Havelock Ellis. The possibility that Sir Phillip synthesised Stephen's masculinity via his sexist and selfish desire for a son is not considered in the book, and is left for the reader to interpolate. For Radclyffe Hall, being an invert is not a choice, it is a destiny chosen by God for an unknown purpose. In the author's Weltanschauung, 'inverts' have the mark of Cain upon them, and are condemned to suffer. This framing may have been a device intended to solicit sympathy from Christians for transgender people living on the fringes of European society.

Radclyffe Hall was a very devout Catholic, and so is Stephen, her protagonist in The Well of Loneliness. The mark of Cain is not a positive framing of transgender identity, but it is consistent with Radclyffe Hall's religious perspective, derived from the Oxford Movement of nineteenth-century Catholic revival among English intellectuals. It was this movement which built the church colloquially known as 'Brompton Oratory' north of Chelsea, where Radclyffe Hall was reportedly a member of the congregation. Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst was buried in the graveyard at Brompton in 1928, the same year that women over the age of 21 were allowed to vote in England and The Well of Loneliness was first published.

Because Stephen has been born into a very wealthy family living in a country house, she doesn't go to school. Instead, Stephen is educated at home, as was often the case for the upper classes in that period. Stephen has a governess or tutor and servants running around Morton to do everything that she requires. Growing up without friends of her own in the 'big house', Stephen develops a childhood crush on a female servant, Collins. She also forms close attachments to her French tutor and her English governess, the latter known as 'Puddle', as Stephen is educated in languages and classics. There are hints in the text that Puddle understands Stephen's struggle with gender identity more than other women do.

Stephen is far more interested in manliness, and not at all interested in becoming a young woman in the sense that her contemporaries understand. On the cusp of adulthood, Stephen forms a first close friendship with a young male visitor to Morton, Martin Hallam, a landowner who has arrived from his estates in Canada. The friends develop their bond based on a mutual interest in trees, the land and nature, in contrast to the difficult relationship with Stephen's county neighbours who prefer to gossip about this tall and unusual, not to say unnatural horsewoman.

Martin ends the friendship by proposing marriage to Stephen, who is disgusted by the very idea. Stephen wanted to relate to Martin man-to-man, however unlikely that relationship might have been. The novel never raises the possibility of Stephen becoming a literal man, via medical, surgical or legal intervention. Stephen may choose to dress or live as the opposite sex, but despite the author's devout Catholicism, there is no suggestion of self-harm to the physical body; no flagellation or scourging. In Radclyffe Hall's book, the invert's gendered soul may be revealed by certain physical attributes, such as the size of their hands, but the idea that the body should be modified to match the soul is not once considered.

Martin leaves England following the humiliation of his rejection by Stephen, and we don't read of him again until almost the end of the book. Stephen decides that she wants to become a writer, which her father thought fitting, and is practical as the Morton estate provides Stephen with a private income. In this plot development we can recognise the echo of Radclyffe Hall's own life, as a writer of independent means who went by a male name. (In the double-barrelled Radclyffe Hall's case that first name was John, adopted by her choice in later life, not given to her by her father). When Stephen becomes a novelist, readers are given a strong impression that The Well of Loneliness is at least semi-autobiographical. In fact, many of the details of Stephen's life, including her talent for fencing, were based on May 'Toupie' Lowther, an 'invert' friend of the author.

Stephen has problems with her body and self-image; this is not so much an overt theme within the book as it is an undercurrent. There is one clear reference to gender dysphoria, in a moment when Stephen looks at herself. There are far more references to strong muscles, height and gait, and masculine clothing for her female body in the text. Stephen chooses to develop a strong, masculine appearance as a form of self-expression. When she is introduced to polite society, women are noted as rejecting Stephen from this elite social group. While out hunting, Stephen rides her belovèd horse in an aggressive, masculine fashion, jumping the hedges, and taking risks. The men in the county set generally admire Stephen for her courage and prowess at riding. Nevertheless, there are whispers and slanders about Stephen's freakishness. The words 'freak' or 'freakish' appear eight times throughout the book.

One word that you won't read in the Well of Loneliness is 'lesbian', which like 'homosexual' does not appear in the text at all, despite how the book has been marketed to lesbians since its publishers defied the original ban. The words 'queer' or 'queerly' appear sixty times, sometimes several times on the same page, and that is revealing in the context of contemporary queer theory. The young Stephen is not aware of gender identity ideology; how could she be, in the context of her late Victorian and Edwardian upbringing, isolated from other 'inverts'?

Theories of gender are not discussed in The Well of Loneliness; it is simply presented as fact that Stephen's condition of inversion is congenital. There are references to her father having German books containing esoteric knowledge about inverts in his library. Later in the novel there is a specific reference to a book by Krafft-Ebing, presumably his best-known work Psychopathia Sexualis. It is understood from the text that Stephen's father possesses insight about her 'condition' that we might now describe as gender dysphoria. He has not shared this insight with anybody, not even his own wife Lady Anna, who remains estranged from her masculine child.

As Stephen matures, she forms adult relationships with 'normal' women (the description used by the author). There is a very unsuccessful affair between Stephen and a married woman, Angela, who is not requiting Stephen's affections but is just bored with her husband, and enjoying the attentions of a tall, strong and passionate invert.

This affair with Angela highlights the distinction between lesbianism and inversion as explained in the novel. For Radclyffe Hall, there are female inverts, and there are women who have intimate relationships with female inverts. Therefore the 19th century sexological theory that inversion of identity, being 'born in the wrong body', is the cause of homosexuality implies these 'normal' women must be heterosexual. They are supposedly responding in an entirely passive manner to the masculine soul of the invert. The limitations of inversion theory dictate that female inverts cannot form relationships with men or each other, as these possibilities would fail to explain away the gay.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Stephen volunteers for front-line service but is denied the opportunity because of her natal sex. She instead serves as an ambulance driver behind the front lines; being a person of masculine interests, Stephen already knows how to drive a car. That is an unusual thing for a young woman of the period to be doing, but because of her wealth, it is explained that Stephen had the means to buy her own 'motor'. Of course, 'Toupie' Lowther was a wartime ambulance driver in real life; if you are friends with a novelist, be careful about the stories you share if you don't want to be outed later.

Stephen's strength, skill and daring make her a valuable recruit as an ambulance driver, fetching casualties to field hospitals. In the later stages of the 'Great War', women are allowed to go to the front lines. Stephen volunteers to drive her ambulance on to the battlefields and receives a wound to her face from a piece of shrapnel, resulting in a scar which marks her for the rest of her life. This scar is not so much a mark of Cain as a signifier of her masculine chivalry, rescuing brothers-in-arms from certain death.

During her war service, Stephen realises that there are other inverts like her. In the desperate times of the Great War all help is needed, even from female inverts existing on the fringes of society. The ambulance service includes these tall, strong women who are shunned by convention but are very useful in an emergency because they are capable, competent and not so 'feminine'. The references to other women like Stephen are the beginning of a community.

In the ambulance unit, Stephen meets Mary Llewellyn, a young Welsh orphan who is described as 'normal', not an invert; the two women form a romantic relationship. Stephen is awarded the Croix de Guerre medal, a high honour from the French military, for her valour as an ambulance driver on the battlefield. After the war ends, Stephen and Mary begin living together; they rent a holiday villa at Orotava in Tenerife, and settle as a household in central Paris, in the Rue Jacob.

In the French capital is discovered a much larger community of inverts than Stephen previously realised existed, within the demi-monde of sleazy bars and nightclubs. Many of the inverts who have settled in Paris gather at Valérie Seymour's open house, which might now be described as a queer community, to meet and fall in love. Despite living openly, the community in Paris is depicted as partly tragic, and partly pathetic, with a lot of late-night dancing and hard drinking.

The introduction at this stage in the novel of male inverts allows Stephen to understand that inversion is not just something that happens to women. Jonathan Brockett, a playwright, is an intelligent and witty man but he is not emotionally involved with Stephen. There is mutual recognition between Stephen and Brockett that although they are both inverts, they are in very different categories.

In Paris, Stephen is able to return to writing novels and begins to enjoy some success. Because of inherited wealth, in any case Mary and Stephen can live independently without having to worry about money. There's an attempt made by Mary to help with Stephen's writing by working as her typist, but that's not successful. Mary becomes bored living in Paris with not much to do, especially when Stephen is busy with her writing.

Stephen recognises that she cannot give Mary a 'respectable' life; there is no question of her giving Mary the children she assumes that her lover wants. This recognition leads to the novel's concluding theme of sacrifice. Martin Hallam re-enters the story; he's received an eye injury in the Great War and has been recuperating in Paris. He just happens to be living around the corner from Stephen, who is very glad to have her male friend back in her life, at least at first.

The ending of the book is not what you would expect in a transgender novel today, and I suspect this is why the Well of Loneliness is not more widely read or advocated for. Nevertheless, it is a key text in the history of not only writing about transgender people, but writing by transgender people.

Stephen's belief that inverts are marked by God for suffering and sacrifice is not at all compatible with today's culture of self-gratification and entitlement. For that reason, The Well of Loneliness is likely to be more popular with open-minded Catholics and other Christians than it would be with the contemporary secular transgender community.

I would recommend that if you want to read The Well of Loneliness, you skip the introduction to the book, and come back to that part later if you wish. The novel deserves to stand alone as a work its own right without being contextualised by the publishers or editors, depending on the particular frame that they wish to use at the time.

The most striking aspect of the 1982 Virago paperback edition's introduction is that Stephen's notions of inversion, or gender identity as we would put it today, were considered completely out of date and irrelevant over forty years ago. Virago's introduction makes the case that lesbianism is a political choice, not innate, and certainly not a congenital disorder. In the English context of the early 1980's, campaigns such as the Greenham Common protest against nuclear weapons were prominently lesbian movements. Virago's introduction suggested the Well of Loneliness was theoretically invalid while simultaneously claiming it as a lesbian novel, despite the word lesbian failing to appear in the text. The conception that Stephen is a woman making a political rationalisation to love another woman just does not exist in the book.

I'm sure that if you read a current edition the book will be framed in a very different way, and not necessarily an accurate one. The Well of Loneliness could be considered an embarrassment to those contemporary gender activists who might wish they could acknowledge it. The text provides early evidence that transgender people not only existed a century ago, but were articulate about their own lives. Unfortunately for advocates of gender-affirming interventions, the novel makes clear that Radclyffe Hall's religious ideas of the 1920s are the same ideas presented today as progressive and scientific: gendered souls can be born in the wrong body, making inversion (or gender identity disorder) innate.

I believe this is why The Well of Loneliness isn't routinely taught in schools, despite being a seminal text on a very current topic. It reveals that Victorian men publishing in German, from Krafft-Ebing to Sigmund 'penis envy' Freud and Havelock Ellis, invented 'sexological' or 'psychosexual' theories to explain away women who had no interest in making their bodies available to men. Margaret Sanger, founder of the organisation known as Planned Parenthood which carries out gender transition interventions on Americans today, referred to Havelock Ellis as her 'King'.

My reading of The Well of Loneliness is that what many Westerners now assume to be a progressive liberation movement called 'gender identity' is actually the resurgence of very old ideas with questionable origins and a general lack of scientific validity. The quackery of men who assumed that these unusual women could be explained in terms of their own conjectures now appears as so much patriarchal, paternalistic hubris.

Havelock Ellis's pathologising of minority sexualities was meant to make the invert blameless, establishing that their behaviour was not their responsibility, in the hope that this would lead to decriminalisation of male homosexuality. (Female homosexuality had never been a legal matter in England). This pathological paradigm lead directly to attempts to 'cure' homosexuality with hormonal and surgical interventions, often carried out by the state as a punishment. Most famously, computer scientist Alan Turing and other gay men were administered feminising hormones against their will because of their homosexuality. This egregious abuse of human rights was entirely consistent with the pseudo-scientific theory of inversion, as is the Iranian government's forced gender transition of gay men today.

Almost a century after The Well of Loneliness was written, the Catholic Church remains firm that souls do not have genders, and so being born into the wrong body is an impossibility under that doctrine. Some Protestants might take a different view, as the recent displays of transgender pride flags and an exhibition featuring transgender celebrities at the Church of England's Coventry Cathedral demonstrated.

I would recommend anyone who wants to understand more about transgender people to read The Well of Loneliness, not as an affirmation of gender identity or a user manual on social transition, but as an artefact of historical importance. It's a page-turner, written very much in the style of the Victorian novel, making it very readable compared to the postmodern equivalent. The reader is encouraged by the author's skill to care about the characters and want to know what happens to them.

While there are probably many clones of The Well of Loneliness written in more recent years as transition memoirs, I believe readers will benefit from going back to the source of the genre.