Reflecting On The Well Of Loneliness

‘Noble, accomplished, wealthy, self-sacrificing, and honourable, Stephen Gordon is the perfect hero,’ says Rebecca O’Rourke. But Stephen is a woman, and a lesbian. Here is an indication of the tantalizing complexity of The Well of Loneliness. Banned for obscenity when first published in 1928, The Well is now a bestseller, translated into numerous languages, but it must rank as one of the best known and least understood novels of the twentieth century. It combines the life and times of Stephen Gordon, the novel’s female protagonist, with a plea, directed to God and society, for tolerance towards homosexuality. Stephen Gordon has embodied what it means to be a lesbian for generations of women readers. But, as the perfect hero, she makes for an awkward heroine. Originally published in 1989, herself a novelist, critic, and lesbian, Rebecca O’Rourke examines what makes the figure of Stephen Gordon both infuriating and inspiring to lesbian and non-lesbian readers alike. She details the novel’s fascinating publishing history through an analysis of the motives and preoccupations of previous critics and biographers, many of whom mistakenly saw in The Well of Loneliness a fictional account of Radclyffe Hall’s own life. The novel’s status as the ‘bible of lesbianism’ has been a mixed blessing, often confirming the worst stereotypes of lesbianism, while at the same time ensuring its visibility. Rebecca O’Rourke includes a fascinating survey of reader’s reactions to the book which was still, at the time, so many years after its first publication, the first ‘lesbian’ novel many women picked up.

Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet. Feeling Backward makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present. Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, Feeling Backward argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.

This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Well of Loneliness" by Marguerite Radclyffe Hall. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A comprehensive reference presents over five hundred full essays on authors and a variety of topics, including censorship, genre, patronage, and dictionaries.

This book is an in-depth qualitative linguistic study of loneliness disclosures in interviews with undergraduate students in the UK. While much loneliness research has been undertaken in the areas of psychology, social policy and education, such studies have prioritised the social factors behind mental distress without paying explicit attention to the medium in which such distress is communicated and embodied (i.e. language). This monograph supplements this growing body of work by arguing for a stronger focus on the insights which linguistic analysis can provide for investigating how and why loneliness is disclosed by Higher Education students. This book is the first study to address discourses of loneliness in Higher Education specifically from a linguistic perspective, and will be of interest to education and healthcare professionals, counselling and welfare providers, and students and scholars of discourse analysis and linguistics.