Radclyffe Hall — The Well of Loneliness with Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Often called “the lesbian Bible,” Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness has been sparking debate for nearly a century. Banned in the UK after an infamous obscenity trial, the book remains a lightening rod for readers — some revere it, others can’t stand it. We’ll explore what makes this groundbreaking novel so remarkable (and so divisive) with returning guest Iris Jamahl Dunkle, who found inspiration in Hall’s protagonist for her forthcoming book on strong-bodied women who refuse to conform to society’s standards.

Mentioned in this episode:

Kim and Amy’s October 14 LitQuake appearance: “Scribbling Women” Strike Back: How Long-Silenced Voices Have Fueled a New Resistance

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (new Oxford Press edition)

Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Substack article on Radclyffe Hall

“Bad Gays” podcast episode on Radclyffe Hall

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 27 on Charmian Kittredge London

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 214 on Sanora Babb

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 152 on Janet Lewis

Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Womb House Books

Cita Press

Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond

Havelock Ellis

Edith Ellis

Djuna Barnes

Natalie Clifford Barney

Margaret Vandenburg

Transcript

Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness) with Iris Jamahl Dunkle

[Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain minor errors and typos.]

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more, 

KIM ASKEW: Hey everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. But before we jump into today's episode, we wanted to give a quick reminder: We're going to be in Berkeley on Tuesday, October 14th, as part of a LitQuake panel at Mrs. Dalloway’s bookstore. That's at 7:00 PM on October 14th. We're going to be talking about recovering forgotten women writers. If you're in the area, we really hope you'll stop by. We'd love to see you, and we're going to be joined by some other great panelists, including several previous guests from our show: Mimi Pond, she's the author of the Mitford book we discussed in our last full length episode; Cita Press editor Jessi Haley, and our good friend, biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle.

AMY: I cannot wait to hang out with them all that week. It's going to be so fun. Iris, by the way, has been such a good sport about letting us rope her into guest spots on this show, and we've snagged her again today. So I've been wanting to do an episode on Radclyffe Hall’s, The Well of Loneliness ever since I read it last year for the first time. It's a seminal work of queer literature first published in 1928. And so over the summer I saw that Iris had written about Radclyffe Hall and this book for her Substack, and I was like, “Okay, that settles it. You have to come on the show to discuss this one with us.”

KIM: Yeah, we can link to her Substack article in our show notes. This will mark Iris's fourth stint as a Lost Lady of Lit guest — that's a new record for the show and with good reason. She's just so fun and she always has interesting insight and I can't wait to hear what she has to say about The Well of Loneliness. It was described as the first “lesbian novel”, and this book caused a lot of controversy in its day.

AMY: Yeah, and even now, almost a century later, this book has its detractors for completely different reasons. In fact, I'm sure there are some people who are listening to this as we speak and groaning a little bit wondering why we're devoting an episode to it. Radclyffe Hall has a complex legacy to say the least. What's more The Well of Loneliness includes ideas we would now consider outdated and even problematic. Yet we can't overstate its lasting impact and importance.

KIM: Yeah, it sounds like we have our work cut out for us. So let's read the bannedd books and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, is a professor, poet and acclaimed biographer hailing from Sonoma County, California. In recent years, she has chronicled the life of Charmian Kittridge London, as well as Dust Bowl writer Sanora Babb. We will link to both of those books in our show notes, or you can go back to Episodes 27 and 214 of this podcast to learn more.

KIM: Iris also joined us in 2023 to discuss the writer Janet Lewis. That was a great episode, I loved it. Iris, you recently read The Well of Loneliness for the first time. How did you discover it?

IRIS: Well, first I just wanna say it's great to be back. I love that I've been here more than anybody else because I'm a competitive person.

AMY: Which we're going to be getting into, right?

KIM: Yes.

IRIS: Right. So I picked up this first edition of The Well of Loneliness at Womb House Books. It's a brick and mortar bookstore run by Jessica Ferri in Oakland, but it's also an Etsy online bookstore that's been around for a while. And she always has these incredible feminist finds. So sometimes I just troll it and look for books, which is really bad. But this one came up and I really wanted to read this book for a long time, but just a few weeks before I was in London at this Amy Lowell symposium, um, and I met the scholar Hannah Roche, who presented on Amy Lowell. And she had just edited, with Jana Funke, this Oxford edition of The Well of Loneliness that she was talking about to me. 

AMY: Womb House books … I didn't realize that was a brick and mortar store. (I'm so used to seeing the books on the rug that she does, you know, like that image, um, that I just thought it was an online venture for her.) And also we should say that Jessica Ferri, the owner is also going to be joining us in Berkeley on the panel.

IRIS: Yes, it's so exciting. And also, Emily Van Duyne, who wrote Loving Sylvia Plath, which is an incredible book. So it's going to be great.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so the English physician, Havelock Ellis, who studied human sexuality and wrote the first medical textbook on homosexuality, endorsed this book. He stated, “I have read The Well of Loneliness with great interest because, apart from its fine qualities as a novel by a writer of accomplished art, it possesses a notable psychological and sociological significance.So far as I know, it is the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us today. The relation of certain people who, while different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes of the highest character and the finest aptitudes to the often hostile society in which they move, presents difficult and still unsolved problems. The poignant situations which thus arrive are here set forth so vividly, and yet with such complete absence of offense, that we must place Radclyffe Hall's book on a high level of distinction.” 

And quick side note, Havelock Ellis married an openly lesbian woman, the English writer, Edith Ellis. (Havelock Ellis) was a man. So that's an interesting situation there. And I'm marking down Edith Ellis, Kim, for a possible future episode. We should check her out. Havelock Ellis, also in 1897, he coined the term “sexual inversion,” which is an outdated description that sort of conflates homosexuality and transgender identity. So Hall also described both herself and the book's protagonist as inverts. And it's a label we would not use today, of course, but that term may pop up in this episode as we discuss the book.

KIM: So speaking of the book, let's explore this protagonist Stephen Gordon. She's an only child, and she's named Stephen by her parents because they were really, really wishing and hoping for a son. They live on an English country estate in a red brick Georgian house called Morton Hall… upper class. We spend a lot of time with Stephen in her youth. It's idyllic in many ways. But she realizes really early on that she's different. At about seven years old, she tells a housemaid (for whom she harbors her first crush) that she feels like a boy. Her father, his name is Sir Philip, he senses it too, and Amy, do you just wanna read the passage where he starts to have his suspicions? Because it's really great.

AMY: Sure. So Hall writes: 

Sometimes, when the child's heart would feel full past bearing, she must tell him her problems in small, stumbling phrases. Tell him how much she longed to be different, longed to be someone like Nelson.

She would say: ' Do you think that I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard - or prayed, Father ? '

Then Sir Philip would smile and tease her a little, and would tell her that one day she would want pretty frocks, and his teasing was always excessively gentle, so that it hurt not at all.

But at times he would study his daughter gravely, with his strong, cleft chin tightly cupped in his hand. He would watch her at play with the dogs in the garden, watch the curious suggestion of strength in her movements, the long line of her limbs - she was tall for her age - and the poise of her head on her over-broad shoulders. Then perhaps he would frown and become lost in thought, or perhaps he might suddenly call her:

Stephen, come here ! '

She would go to him gladly, waiting expectant for what he should say; but as likely as not he would just hold her to him for a moment, and then let go of her abruptly. Getting up he would turn to the house and his study, to spend all the rest of that day with his books.

A queer mixture, Sir Philip, part sportsman, part student. He had one of the finest libraries in England, and just lately he had taken to reading half the night, which had not hitherto been his custom. Alone in that grave-looking, quiet study, he would unlock a drawer in his ample desk, and would get out a slim volume recently acquired, and would read and re-read it in the silence. The author was a German, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and reading, Sir Philip's eyes would grow puzzled; then groping for a pencil he would make little notes all along the immaculate margins. Sometimes he would jump up and pace the room quickly, pausing now and again to stare at a picture - the

portrait of Stephen painted with her mother, by Millais, the previous year. He would notice the gracious beauty of Anna, so perfect a thing, so completely reassuring; and then that indefinable quality in Stephen that made her look wrong in the clothes she was wearing, as though she and they had no right to each other, but above all no right to Anna. After a while he would steal up to bed, being painfully careful to tread very softly, fearful of waking his wife who might question: ' Philip darling, it's so late - what have you been reading ? ' He would not want to answer, he would not want to tell her; that was why he must tread very softly.

The next morning, he would be very tender to Anna - but even more tender to Stephen.

The next morning he would be very tender to Anna, but even more tender to Stephen. 

So that locked cabinet of sexology books that you hear about is going to come into play later on in the novel when Stephen, as a young woman, stumbles upon it and finally begins to understand that there's a name to describe how she's feeling.

KIM: Yeah. And as time goes on, um, Stephen starts to train in these various athletic pursuits. He's doing, or she's actually, (I think of Stephen as a he a lot, so I, I might switch back and forth, uh, in gender, excuse me.) Um… fencing, horseback riding, weightlifting and gymnastics. Um, and this brings us back to the Substack article that you wrote about on this book, Iris. Can you talk about why Stephen's physicality caught your attention in particular?

IRIS: Yeah, definitely. (And that gender… you know, not knowing which pronoun to use, it's really, I had the same experience while I was reading this. I wonder what, pronouns Radclyffe Hall would've identified with had she had that choice.) Um, so what struck me, reading this book, was how Radclyffe Hall always described the relationship that Stephen Gordon had with her body, and her desire for physical activity. So, when she's coming into her adolescence and she's getting very uncomfortable with what her body's becoming and noticing how different she was from all the other girls around her in not only her body, but how she thinks about her body, um, and how she moves in the world, which is quite physical. She wants to pick up sports, right? So she asked her dad if she can start fencing and lifting weights. And at the time there was this famous, bodybuilder, a strong man called Eugene Sandow. And he was just like the perfect form that everyone wanted to acquire. So when she's talking to her dad, this is a quote from the book. She says, “I wanna go in for Sandowing,” which is, you know, like using that name. Stephen informed her father as though they were discussing a career. Like “I wanna become like a strong man.” You know? I think that's so funny. But we see throughout the book like this connection to something that I identified with. I've always been a strong-bodied woman. And growing up I looked different than the other girls around me. Like, I had strong shoulders like you were just describing in that passage. Um, and I had a muscular form, and it didn't fit in regular women's clothes. Like, if I got a prom dress, it had to be altered so that, you know, it fit my shoulders. So it was so refreshing because I find few examples of women talking about being athletic and how they relate to sports as a way of being in their body and how like, um, when tragedy strikes Stephen later in the book, she goes directly to weightlifting as a way to cope with her stress, which is exactly what I do. So I'm really focused right now on this topic with my new book that I'm writing. And also the same way that queerness is fetishized, so is the idea of being muscular, right? Like both of those things are fetishized by men. And, there's those stereotypes that exist of like, you know, if you're athletically built in the 1980s, you're called lesbian, you know? (Which didn't realize it was such a compliment at the time, right?) But the idea that a woman wrote about being an athlete and finding solace in that muscularity and the ability to be athletic in the world was so refreshing and beautiful for me.

AMY: So real quick, what is the book that you're working on?

IRIS: So I'm writing a book about the history of strong-bodied women in America. And it looks at the early ideas of what strong women were: strong women as freak shows, like The Great Sandwina and, up until like Muscle Beach with people like Pudgy Stockton, who's seen, like, holding her husband up above her head. And all the way up into like the 1980s before steroids became a big controversy, how the form of women was accepted to be larger and larger and larger. And, then it completely, you know, fell through. Um, so the idea of like, what happened and why does America want its women to be small-bodied? Even like, think back to like Mary Lou Retton, you know, when Mary Lou Retton was winning gold medals, people called her “Thunder Thighs.” Like, can you believe that? Like, it's so messed up. So I'm just kind of curious culturally why, you know, why that happens to women? And I, you know, want to counteract it.

KIM: That sounds amazing, Iris. I'm so excited for that. So Stephen's strength and appreciation for these typically male pursuits unsettles her mother, Anna. Anna is really irritated by the fact that Stephen isn't conforming to these societal expectations for young women. And Hall provides a really strong contrast between the reactions of Stephen's mother and of Stephen's father.

AMY: Yeah, they have such wildly different reactions and I mean her father, Sir Philip, in particular, he struck me (and I think I will always think of him as) one of the great fathers in literature. Like he's up there with Charles Ingalls in terms of kindness and sympathy. Yes, he's concerned, he's worried. It's all concern and worry for her and what her future's going to be and protecting her. Then contrast that with this mother who, God… some of the scenes between Stephen and her mom are just so grueling to read, you know? The things that her own mother says to her. It is just heartbreaking.

IRIS: And it feels almost metaphorical the way that the mother and the father represent these different ways of approaching her difference, you know? Like the father is so curious and supportive and it is trying to adapt and trying to learn, right? Whereas the mother is just like, “No. This is abnormal. I will not deal with this.”

KIM: And cruel.

IRIS: Yeah. And cruel.

AMY: It made me wonder about Radclyffe Hall's own parents, so maybe this is a good time here to share a little bit of information about her own life. She insisted that The Well of Loneliness was not an autobiographical novel, but there are certainly details that she drew from her own life. So she was born Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall in 1880, but she hated the girliness of her first name and so later in life she called herself John or Johnny. Her parents' marriage was not a happy one. Her wealthy English father abandoned the family, actually, when Hall was two years-old. So there wasn't really a father figure. (Actually, there was a stepfather figure who also was not a great situation for her.) Um, her mother was an American, and she rejected Hall in much the same way that Anna rejects Stephen in the book. So it sounds like Radclyffe Hall's childhood was extremely sad and possibly even abusive.

KIM: Hall had one very important advantage, however. She had an inheritance from her father that left her independently wealthy, and it gave her more freedom to live on her own terms. She did wear men's fashions: trousers, cravats, top hats. Um, it had me thinking of another excerpt from The Well of Loneliness. In this one, Stephen had a heated argument with her mother who has bought a fancy dress for Stephen to wear. So I'll just read that passage here:

She wrenched off the dress and hurled it from her, longing intensely to rend it, to hurt it, longing to hurt herself in the process, yet filled all the while with that sense of injustice. But this mood changed abruptly to one of self pity; she wanted to sit down and weep over Stephen; on a sudden impulse she wanted to pray over Stephen as though she were some one apart, yet terribly personal too in her trouble. Going over to the dress she smoothed it out slowly; it seemed to have acquired an enormous importance; it seemed to have acquired the importance of prayer, the poor, crumpled thing lying crushed and dejected. Yet Stephen, these days, was not given to prayer. God had grown so unreal, so hard to believe in since she had studied Comparative Religion; engrossed in her studies she had somehow mislaid Him. But now, here she was, very wishful to pray, while not knowing how to explain her dilemma: ' I'm terribly unhappy, dear, improbable God — ' would not be a very propitious beginning…”

AMY: Uh, I love that passage. It just makes me think of trying to pray the gay away, you know? She was from this religious Christian upbringing and she doesn't know what to do with her and how to reconcile that with what she's feeling. It's like she's having an inner crisis about all that. And I feel like also the fact that she refers to herself in the third person in this passage at one point is interesting. It's like she's disassociating from herself, especially in relation to this dress, like, “That's not me. That's not who I am. I don't want to wear this dress.” And she knows how important the dress is to her mom, and that's making it tough. 

IRIS: It’s like a symbol of this unattainable version of herself. You know, that she's trying to bring to life in some way, but it's impossible. It's just not going to happen. And she feels like there's no God that sees her for who she actually is.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And then also that she mentioned she wants to hurt herself, too, so I think that's painful and interesting as well.

AMY: I mean, so many of these passages throughout the book like this, you really can relate to it in terms of thinking about people still going through this when they're a young person and coming to terms with what their identity is. These are all emotions that seem very real. Clearly she's very unhappy throughout the book. Stephen's family wealth, like Radclyffe Hall’s, does give her some economic and personal freedom eventually, as the novel moves forward. She realizes with this money that she has, she can dabble in a man's world. So let's compare that to the first serious love interest that she has. It's a married coquette by the name of Angela Crossby. What did we all think of Angela?

IRIS: That was heartbreaking.

AMY: The worst. I mean, going back to my Charles Ingalls… you cannot compare this book to Little House on the Prairie AT ALL…. but if Sir Philip is Charles Ingalls, Angela is Nelly Olson. 

IRIS: Oh my gosh, she’s totally Nelly!

AMY: I think she has the ringlets like that. The blonde ringlets.

KIM: Yes, that's how I pictured her. 

AMY: Like a little fluff ball. And the problem with Angela is she just wants to dabble. She's never willing to really give up her married lifestyle for it. 

KIM: She doesn't have the freedom of Stephen.

AMY: She comes across like such a villain in the book, because she's toying with Stephen, right? I mean, that's the best way to describe it.

IRIS: She's also, she's not willing to take that risk. And I think that part of it is like she wants to stay that dress on the bed, you know, that you were reading from the last passage. 

KIM: She wants to have it all.

IRIS: She does, but she also isn't, like, what, um… Stephen has absorbed from her father this curiosity, this adaptability, that's keeping her alive, really. Angela doesn't have that. 

AMY: No. And Hall gives a little bit of her backstory so that you at least have some sympathy. She does have to stay in her marriage. She's trapped. She would be ruined and like, have no recourse if something were to fall apart and she didn't have this straight marriage to fall back on. It's her safety net.

IRIS: She represents a whole class of women that had to live this way. So I think it's important that she exists, even though when you're reading it, you're like, “This is bullshit.” You know, like it's just really upsetting. But at the same time, if you think of this book in a larger scale as representative of a cultural history of a time, um, then you see where she is important as a character.

AMY: Hmm. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. And it's probably not a spoiler alert, you probably get that Stephen's love affair with Angela ends badly. And Stephen eventually leaves home and in these ensuing years. She pursues a writing career. She explores the queer scene in Paris. She seeks love and acceptance against the backdrop of World War I. Happiness does come in fits and starts, but generally it remains elusive to her. Uh, there's a reason the book's called The Well of Loneliness, right?

IRIS: Yeah.

AMY: So let's shift our focus now to the reception this book received upon its publication. So there's nothing sexually explicit in this book. It's definitely not Lady Chatterley's Lover. I was kind of expecting there to be some moment, but there's nothing. Yet it sparked outrage. Iris, why don't you explain all that?

IRIS: Yeah, so in August, 1928, James Douglas, who was the editor for The Sunday Express, he launched this moral campaign against this book. And he wrote this piece called, “A book that Must be Suppressed.” And here's a quote from that article: “The cleverness of the book intensifies its moral danger. The book must at once be withdrawn. I hope the author and the publishers will realize that they have made a grave mistake and will, without delay, do all in their power to repair it.”

 So he makes this campaign and it actually takes effect, right? Because he thought the book was like this form of propaganda, where it was asking readers to treat same-sex relationships between women with tolerance rather than with fear or disgust, which is how they were, you know, thought of before. And so the book was put on trial in England, and it had celebrity people, um, you know, testifying, like Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf's husband, um, and…

AMY: …On her behalf we should say.

IRIS: On her behalf. Yes, the Woolfs always supported free speech; that's important to say. And a London magistrate, Sir Charles Byron, ruled that even though it was dignified and restrained, as we were just talking about, (it didn't have these illicit passages and it made an appeal to decent people) he judged the book to be obscene and ordered all the copies of it be destroyed. And as a result, the novel was not published in the United Kingdom for 20 years after that. Like, it was impossible to find, which of course was a marketing bonanza. It became a bestseller outside of England because everyone's like, “Oh, banned book! About lesbians! I wanna see this!” Right?

KIM: You can imagine them all frantically looking for something, you know, titillating or whatever. It's not there!

IRIS: Yeah. 

AMY: Well, we, um, recently had a conversation with “Stuck in a Book” blogger Simon David Thomas. Um, we were talking about this book and he mentioned that the actual sentence, the thing that was so shocking, you know, like, oh no, you can't say this. Here's what it was: “That night, they were not divided.” That's the only thing that is said about two women spending the night together that night. “They were not divided.” That was the explosive line, which is hilarious. And I love that the original detractor that you mentioned, who wrote the first article that he's like, “This book's cleverness is a problem.” So basically saying the problem is that this book is so good and people are going to enjoy reading it, that it's going to be a propaganda tool. So that's saying the quality of the book is troubling in that it's going to work!

IRIS: Exactly,

KIM: I gotta say just like the writing style, and especially in the beginning when it's like her childhood, it's so well written. I mean, Amy and I talked about it being like, you know, Charles Dickens or something.

IRIS: I think that first chapter is so gorgeous, like just the opening passage. Could we read the opening passage? Is that possible?

KIM: Oh yeah, completely. Because I want our listeners to get that. It's a great read too.

IRIS: Yeah. I, I think the, the first, I'll read the first little section. “Chapter One… 

[reads]

So I just, I think it's so gorgeous the structure of the sentences and you know, it's almost like a fairy tale, but you can see her poetic background. She wrote several volumes of poetry before she became a novelist.

KIM: Yeah, and we didn't really talk too much about her education, but in the “Bad Gays” podcast episode, they talked about how somebody said she was the least educated writer in the National Portrait Gallery. Because her mom kind of ignored her education. 

AMY: It was typical for that time for upperclass women. Like when we talk about the Mitford sisters, too, they receive a very cursory, you know, education

KIM: But yet she wrote these amazing…

IRIS: Clearly she was self-educated. 

KIM: Yeah. 

IRIS: Clearly she read a great deal.

AMY: And I love that she starts off, I mean, she's setting up what we've already kind of talked about, um, in terms of the parents and their differences, but also like the archetypal woman that she presents at the beginning. And my second time reading this book through, I stopped at the part with the stream going in two directions. It's almost like that's binary identity. You know, it's going into two opposite lakes. 

KIM: Yes, exactly. 

IRIS: I'm in love with the first half of this book so much because of the structure. It's just gorgeous. 

AMY: I mean, I would say the first third of the book was my favorite part. I wasn't as interested for whatever reason in what happened to her later. It's really her coming of age that I found the most compelling in this book.

IRIS: Yeah.

AMY: Um, okay. So despite all the hate that she received with the banning of this book in England, Hall was inundated with letters from grateful readers who identified with Stephen and straight readers, too, wrote to her noting that the book helped them gain understanding and empathy. And that's exactly what Hall hoped this book would achieve when she was writing it. So game-changing, culturally, and it's still today known as the “lesbian bible.” But I do think, as I mentioned in the intro, that there are some readers, particularly in the L-G-B-T-Q community, who roll their eyes at this book and the reasons are myriad. So let's get into it a little bit. Um. For starters, I think there's a tendency to see this book as sort of a pity party. You know, there's a lot of “woe is me” happening throughout the book, and so readers might be turned off by that kind of melodrama and angst, which is kind of, it's never ending. Even the very last portion of the book, you're still seeing that. Um, what do you guys think? Was there anything that struck you as like, okay, I get why maybe people have a problem with it today?

IRIS: Well, I can remember when I first read this book, I was so excited by the first half of it. I just read like a third of it and I went to my dear friend, JJ Wilson, who runs The Sitting Room and was like, “Oh my God, let's talk about The Well of Loneliness.” Because she's like the one person that's read literally every book in the world. And so whenever I read something new, I'm like, “I gotta go talk to JJ.” And so I'm talking to her. She's like, “Oh my God, I hate that ending.” And you know, she just had only negative things to say. And so I was so surprised by that reaction. And she also said, “It's such a controversial book in the queer community.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” So I just had to dive into doing homework and understanding it. And Hannah Roche also brought that up, and it's also covered in the “Bad Gays” podcast that we all listen to, which I think is a brilliant discussion about it, led by her co-editor of the Oxford Edition, but it's also in that introduction to that version of the book. So I think modern readers that maybe are not reading the first edition like I did and read the Oxford edition, which I highly recommend, will see an essay that really discusses these issues before they dive into the book. So they'll go into it with eyes wide open. But I think it's really important to talk about it as something of its time period at the same time that we don't give it license to be… what it is, you know what I mean? I think this book is important to exist, but we also need to question it.

KIM: Yeah, it's a piece of history, but it's not the be all and end all, and you have to take it within the time period that it was written. It's part of a much larger history. 

IRIS: Exactly. 

AMY: So this “Bad Gays” podcast, they do an episode on Radclyffe Hall, as we mentioned, and the title of the podcast makes it sound like, “Oh, she's a bad person.” No, they give it a very fair analysis.

KIM: It's more nuanced than that. Yeah.

AMY: She was kind of pandering to straight readers with this book a little bit, and she was kind of giving them a little bit of what they needed to see to make it palatable. So she had an agenda, and part of that ties into the ending, which is an ending that will make people wanna throw the book across the room, probably in a lot of ways, but in some ways, straight readers at the time would've been like, “Okay, that makes me feel safe.” You know what I mean? “That makes me feel comfortable and so I can be okay with this book.”

IRIS: Yeah. And that idea that a woman's sexuality, like if a woman was attracted to another woman, that was literally not possible in the minds of time periods previous to this. It wasn't illegal for women to love women because there's nothing to that, right? 

AMY: Because people couldn't even imagine what they could be getting up to. 

IRIS: What could they do without a penis? 

AMY: Yeah. Exactly. but that I think is also part of what makes this book a little bit problematic is there's a little bit of hypocrisy in that Radclyffe Hall was openly loving women in her life. So she, for a long time, lived happily with another woman and wasn't miserable or shameful about it. But then she's creating a character that has so much shame and so much self-loathing, you know?

IRIS: You know, I wonder how much like … I know publicly she was able to live that way and she had the money and means to be able to do that. But you know, we've mentioned that her upbringing might not have been as, you know, she might be showing the trauma she went through early in life to get to where she was. You know, like I think there's some truth to it.

KIM: Like both things could be true.

AMY: And she said even when she denied that this book was autobiographical, she does say “but it does draw on real emotions that I've had.” 

IRIS: Exactly. Yeah. And, and I think the ending, like you brought up, she was playing to her audience. You know, I, that's the only way I can explain it. Yeah. Pandering to her audience. I was like, “Oh man!” You know?

AMY: Um, and we should also say, there are some racist moments in the book. She had some anti-Semitic connections in her life. Um, I think we learned in that podcast “Bad Gays” that she had somewhat abusive, coercive relationships with some of the lovers in her life too. So, um, there are like a litany of things that we can point out as, “Ehhhh,” you know, from today's standpoint we're like, “Arrghh, I don't know.” But, um, at the end of the day, I cannot admit to not loving this book. I just enjoyed it so much, you know?

IRIS: I feel like it's a really important book for so many reasons. It's one of those where you don't want to condemn parts of it to get rid of the whole.

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: Definitely. Which happens in a lot of the books that we cover on this podcast 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: So it just, unfortunately it's historic. 

IRIS: I mean literally if we did that, we'd get rid of probably a lot of books on your bookshelf and mine.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. 

KIM: Exactly.

AMY: And in talking about how, you know, she's drawing from her own emotions, I think she was really torn between, you know, her very privileged upper-class upbringing. She came from that world. And then she starts mixing in with like kind of scrappy outsider radicals in the queer community in England and Paris. Um, so she was hanging out with gay intellectuals and queer activists like Emmeline Pankhurst and Ethel Smyth. (We did a previous episode on Ethel Smyth as a “lost lady” of music.) Um. Yeah, she seems like she didn't want to commit fully to the cause, I guess. I don't know. but Jana Funke, in that podcast, she mentioned also that the character of Valerie Seymour in the novel who is like this Paris salon hostess, was inspired by another real lost lady of Lit, Natalie Clifford Barney. Um, so she was an American writer who lived in Paris and kind of every big writer on the Paris scene in the earliest 20th century frequented her salon. Kim, I checked our spreadsheets and we do have her as a future possibility.

KIM: Cool. I was going to ask.

AMY: Yeah, and Hall also knew other gay writers like Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein.

KIM: We have a Djuna Barnes episode coming up next year, which I'm excited about.

IRIS: You guys don't wanna miss the new Gertrude Stein biography by Francesca Wade. It's so good. 

KIM: Ooh, thanks for putting that on our radar. 

IRIS: And she looks at the afterlife of Gertrude Stein too. It's called Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. It's so good.

AMY: Ooh. Okay. Um, yeah, and speaking of Djuna Barnes, so for working ahead for that episode, I just finished Nightwood and so I'm able to kind of compare the two novels and, the guests that we're going to be having for that episode, Margaret Vandenburg — I know that she is going to have a more critical view of Radclyffe Hall, so that's something we can ask her about when the time comes. But I will say that Djuna Barnes is coming from a much more intellectual place compared to Radclyffe Hall. I almost think of Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness today being like the “Okay, Boomer” book, you know, for the L-G-B-T-Q [community] like that's kind of how they feel about The Well of Loneliness. You appreciate the importance, but Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was only a decade later and it's so breathtakingly different and more modern and cutting edge. So I think there's just like maybe an old-fashionedness to it, in comparing the two.

KIM: Yeah. Which I love the old fashionedness of it, but great point, Amy, that completely sets it straight. That makes sense.

IRIS: Yeah. I think in this time when books are being banned and taken off shelves, like the idea that If we just look at a tiny piece of this book and dismiss it because of that, we'll lose this really important, personal perspective…even though I know it's fiction, but the fact that I can read it in 2025 and identify with a protagonist about my experiences growing up in the 1980s in my body as a non-queer body, um, but just as an athletic body is really extraordinary. And there's so few examples of that, and I feel like we are so diminishing of the scope of literature, especially today and how things are being narrowed. And, I love what your podcast is doing and all of these areas that, you know, we're all working in to try to open it back up and look at what is there and feel like a woman's experience is not singular. That we have this incredible history and this incredible number of experiences, um, that we can draw from and see ourselves in.

AMY: Yeah, we don't have to pick Djuna Barnes or Radclyffe Hall. We can have them both. 

IRIS: Exactly. It's not a death match.

AMY: Yeah. 

IRIS: Like, thank God.

KIM: It’s not a competition.

IRIS: Even though everything is a competition!

KIM: Yeah, yeah,

AMY: Especially for you, right? So Iris, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this. I know she's not one of your subjects that you're writing a biography on or anything like that, but we love that whenever you're feeling passionate enough about somebody to come on and join us. 

IRIS: Oh, it's always great to join you guys. I mean, I feel like you're my favorite book club.

KIM: Listeners, we wanna know if you have an opinion about The Well of Loneliness. We wanna hear all the perspectives. So you can write to us at info@LostLadiesofLit, or message us at the “send us a text” link where you listen to this podcast. Um, we technically can't reply back to those texts by the way. So if you want a response from us directly, use our official email.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. As a reminder, we'll be joining Iris in Berkeley on Tuesday, October 14th at Mrs. Dalloway’s books at 7:00 PM. That's our LitQuake panel on forgotten women writers. So join us if you are in the area. Our theme song was written and performed by Jenni Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.