The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

copies. Library subscribers, he said, would not be dictated to as to what they ought or ought not read, but if he judged a book offensive he told the library superintendents not to put it on the open shelves. The Well was not in that category. It was in great demand after the success of Adam’s Breed. Seven hundred copies were in circulation and he had not received a single objection from subscribers.

Those with medical qualifications gave their views to Rubinstein, however specious, with authority. James Norman, lecturer in mental diseases at the Westminster Hospital Medical School and author of Mental Disorders, said sexual inversion was a congenital disposition and The Well of Loneliness an interesting study of sexual inversion in the female. Dr Stella Churchill said the fate of the invert was a melancholy one and this book should act as a warning to young normal girls tempted to experiment with such relationships.

Norman Haire, who was to be Radclyffe Hall’s star witness after Havelock Ellis bowed out, declared that homosexuality ran in families and a person could no more become it by reading books than he (if not she) could become syphilitic by reading about syphilis.

John Thomson Greig, Registrar of the University of Durham, thought society should be educated into accepting inverts. There were more of them than the world supposed and no psychologist worthy of the name confused inversion with induced or acquired homosexuality which was a form of sexual perversion.

Rabbi Joseph Frederick Stern, of the East London Synagogue in Stepney, had set out to read The Well of Loneliness ‘like a prude on the prowl’ looking for obscenities – which he could not find. He ended up feeling ‘profound sympathy for tragic suffering’.

A. P. Herbert, author, barrister and father of ‘three healthy girls and one healthy boy’, read it on the recommendation of his wife. He thought postwar society was in an unnatural state with two million more women than men. ‘This sort of thing was bound to arise from this state of affairs.’ Not being a girl he could not say what effect the book would have on a girl’s mind but if he found a healthy girl of twenty reading it he would say, Read on my child, but you’ll be bored. If he found an unhealthy girl reading it he’d say, Read on, this will be a lesson to you.

Oliver Baldwin, author, journalist, politician and the homosexual son of the Prime Minister, said, ‘Why England should suffer such an attack on the liberty of literature is beyond my comprehension unless we have returned to the days of “Here’s something we don’t understand let’s suppress it,”’ and Mrs Gladys Edge, author of Spiritual Healing and Towards a Christian Commonwealth, said all social workers knew of such cases of the tragedy of people born to such a condition.

Radclyffe Hall was grateful to her defendants but felt boxed in by their equivocation. Their testimony read like tolerance of a club to which others belonged. Their elicited comment seemed riddled with subtext and self-protection. Direct action might have been preferable: marching the streets, Romaine, Toupie and Una chained to the railings. Few of the supporters gathered by Rubinstein could break through the barrier of embarrassment, speak out and rid their words of awkwardness.

‘Our thoughts centre upon Sapphism,’ Virginia Woolf wrote to Quentin Bell on 1 November, ‘we have to uphold the morality of that Well of all that’s stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other; The Well of Loneliness.’ Those due to appear in court met for a buffet supper at the studio of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis. Virginia Woolf left early. ‘The company grew bolder and more outspoken as time went on,’ Vita Sackville-West wrote to her, ‘and the little waitress from Harrods sitting behind the buffet nearly exploded with excitement. There, I thought, is another young life gone wrong.’

At this supper, Leonard Woolf told Virginia she must not go into the witness box or she would ‘cast a shadow over Bloomsbury’ by saying what she and they thought of the book. Bernard Shaw ‘made a long, paradoxical, witty and entirely destructive discourse’, then announced that he was not going to turn up on the day. He was convinced the magistrate would take the line that the book’s literary status was irrelevant and that the only issue would be whether he, the magistrate, regarded the book as obscene.

Up to the day of the trial, Radclyffe Hall plied Rubinstein with supplementary observations and considerations contingent to the case. As counsel, he engaged Norman Birkett for Cape, and J. B. Melville to represent Leopold Hill. Rubinstein advised Birkett that his client wanted to be cross-examined in court and gave him her prepared statement which she planned to read out. It was in the nature of a sermon and an appeal. She reiterated her now well-known high moral purpose: how it was her duty to tell the world the truth ‘about this very grave social problem’, how she was a practising Christian who had studied abnormal psychology, how she wanted to plead for those ‘doomed to be abnormal’.

It is not too much to say that many lives are wrecked through the lack of proper understanding of inversion. For the sake of the future generation inverts should never be encouraged to marry.

I do not regret having written the book. All that has happened has only served to show me how badly my book was needed. I am proud to have written The Well of Loneliness and I would not alter so much as a comma.

… Inverts are certainly no better and no worse than normal people – only when they are good they deserve more praise because from their birth nearly every man’s hand is against them. Hopeless outcasts are a social danger, and persecution is as harmful to the persecutors as to the persecuted.

According to Magnus Hirschfeld whose statistics are generally considered to be the most accurate fifteen person in every thousand are inverted and the question