A novel is burned for demanding tolerance
In 1928, a judge had a lesbian novel destroyed because it demanded tolerance. The ban backfired.
On 16 November 1928, a judgment was handed down at London's Bow Street Magistrates' Court that would shape lesbian literature for decades. Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron declared Radclyffe Hall's novel "The Well of Loneliness" obscene. All seized copies had to be destroyed.
The book had been published in the summer and initially received favourable reviews. Then the editor of the "Sunday Express" published an inflammatory article: he would rather give a healthy child a phial of prussic acid than this novel. The publisher Jonathan Cape took fright and submitted the book to the Home Secretary, who demanded its withdrawal. Cape then had the text printed in Paris, but customs seized the shipments.
What really bothered Biron is remarkable. The novel contains hardly any explicit scenes, and sex between women was not even a crime in England. What the judge found offensive was rather that the protagonist, Stephen Gordon, does not end up as a cautionary example. The book demanded recognition and tolerance for women like her. That was precisely what made it dangerous.
Numerous experts were ready to testify to its literary merit, including Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. Biron did not let them speak, since only the court could decide on obscenity. When Hall protested loudly in the courtroom, he threatened to have her removed. An appeal also failed.
The ban had the opposite effect. In France and the United States the novel found a large readership, and in Britain the subject was suddenly on everyone's lips. Radclyffe Hall died in 1943 without seeing a new British edition. "The Well of Loneliness" only went back on sale there in 1949. Today it is considered one of the most important lesbian novels of the twentieth century.