Why The Well of Loneliness Was Banned: The 1928 Trial, in Detail

The sentence that got the book destroyed is nine words long:

and that night they were not divided.

That is the whole of it. Stephen Gordon and Mary Llewellyn become lovers, and Radclyffe Hall declines to describe anything at all. There is no second sentence. Chapter 39 opens the next morning.

Hall had used the phrase once already. Two hundred pages earlier, in a conversation about trees and whether they go to heaven, Martin Hallam quotes scripture at Stephen — "And in death they were not divided" — the line from Second Samuel about Saul and Jonathan. So the most notorious sentence in British literary censorship is an echo of a Bible verse the novel planted itself, about two men who loved each other.

Nobody at the trial mentioned this. Nobody needed to. The book was not convicted for what it described.

Three weeks

Jonathan Cape published The Well of Loneliness on 27 July 1928 in a cautious first run of 1,500 copies. He priced it at fifteen shillings, roughly twice what an ordinary novel cost, specifically to make it less attractive to sensation-seekers. The early reviews were mixed and quiet.

Then on Sunday 19 August, James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, ran a piece headlined "A Book That Must Be Suppressed," containing the sentence that has outlived everything else he wrote:

I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.

The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, responded inside two days. He called the book "gravely detrimental to the public interest" and let Cape know that criminal proceedings would follow unless it was withdrawn.

Cape announced he had stopped publication. He had also, quietly, leased the rights to Pegasus Press in France; his partner Wren Howard carried the papier-mâché moulds of the type across to Paris, and from 28 September Pegasus was shipping copies back into London to the bookseller Leopold Hill.

They reappeared on shelves, which brought the Home Office back. A seizure warrant was issued on 3 October and a consignment of 250 copies was stopped at Dover — and then released, because the Chairman of the Board of Customs had read the book and thought it was fine. The Metropolitan Police went to Hill's premises with a search warrant and took them there instead.

A trial with forty witnesses and no testimony

The case was heard at Bow Street Magistrates' Court on 9 November 1928, before the Chief Magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron.

Radclyffe Hall was not the defendant. She could not be. The prosecution was brought against Jonathan Cape, her publisher, and Leopold Hill, the bookseller who distributed the Paris edition — the author of the book on trial had no standing to defend it and sat in court as a spectator.

The defence had assembled roughly forty witnesses. Virginia Woolf was there. So were E. M. Forster and the biologist Julian Huxley. Under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 the magistrate was entitled to decide the question himself, and Biron did: not one of them was permitted to give an opinion on the novel.

Here is the part that complicates the usual telling. Woolf did not think the book was any good. She wrote privately that "the dullness of the book is such that any indecency may lurk there—one simply can't keep one's eyes on the page," and to her nephew she called it "that Well of all that's stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other." She went anyway, sat in the courtroom, and waited to be called in defence of a novel she found tedious. Whatever else the defence witnesses were doing, they were not turning up as fans.

What was actually on trial

Biron applied the test from R v Hicklin, an 1868 case: was the material likely to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall"?

His conclusion did not rest on any passage. It rested on the book's argument. Hall had written a novel asking that people like Stephen Gordon be permitted to exist without shame, and Biron held that no reasonable person could regard such a plea as anything but obscene. The offence was not depiction. The offence was advocacy.

There is a bitter irony sitting at the front of the book. Cape had opened it with a commentary from Havelock Ellis, the most respected sexologist in Britain, who wrote that the novel "possesses a notable psychological and sociological significance" and was "the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us to-day." It was there to lend scientific respectability. It also told the court, on page one, that the book was making a case.

Cape and Hill appealed to the Court of Quarter Sessions. Twelve magistrates deliberated for five minutes and upheld the order. Every copy the authorities could find was destroyed.

America read the same book and shrugged

Covici-Friede published it in New York, and the sequence there is almost comic by comparison.

Magistrate Hyman Bushel declared it obscene on 19 February 1929 but sent it up to the New York Court of Special Sessions. On 19 April, after what the court described as a careful reading of the entire book, the charges were cleared. In July the United States Customs Court went further, finding "not one word, phrase, sentence or paragraph which could be truthfully pointed out as offensive to modesty."

Same text. Same nine words. One jurisdiction destroyed it and another could not locate the offence.

Twenty-one years

The Well of Loneliness was republished legally in Britain in 1949, by Falcon Press. No one challenged it.

Radclyffe Hall had died in 1943. She spent the last fifteen years of her life as the author of a book that could not lawfully be sold in her own country, and she did not live to see that end. The ban held for twenty-one years and collapsed without a fight the moment anyone tested it — which suggests it had been running on nothing but inertia for most of that time.

The novel that survived this is not a comfortable one. Stephen Gordon is written as a tragic figure who asks for tolerance rather than equality, borrows Havelock Ellis's medical language of "inversion" to describe herself, and ends the book alone by her own engineering. Plenty of readers since have found that unbearable. It is still the book that made the subject sayable in English, and it was prosecuted precisely because it worked.

Read it

• The Well of Loneliness — all 56 chapters, free, including the dedication and the Havelock Ellis commentary the court read. The sentence is in Chapter 38.
• Carmilla — Le Fanu, 1872. What the same subject looked like when it kept the supernatural cover on and nobody prosecuted anybody. Our close reading is here.
• Regiment of Women — Clemence Dane, 1917. Eleven years earlier, and never prosecuted: it frames the woman at its centre as something to be escaped rather than tolerated, which was a far safer thing to publish.