The Well of Loneliness (1928) Radclyffe Hall

Denounced, banned and applauded — the strange love story of a girl who stood midway between the sexes, complete and unabridged.

Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dress-maker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbor. Angela uses Stephen as an “anodyne against boredom“, allowing her “a few rather schoolgirlish kisses”. Then Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Fearing exposure, Angela shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends a copy to Stephen’s mother. Lady Anna denounces Stephen for “presum[ing] to use the word love in connection with… these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body“. Stephen replies, “As my father loved you, I loved…. It was good, good, good — I’d have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby.” After the argument, Stephen goes to her father’s study and for the first time opens his locked bookcase. She finds a book by Krafft-Ebing — assumed by critics to be Psychopathia Sexualis, a text about homosexuality and paraphilias — and, reading it, learns that she is an invert. —The Well of Loneliness