The Well Of Loneliness

''The Well of Loneliness'' is a lesbian novel by British author Radclyffe Hall that was first published in 1928 by Jonathan Cape. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose " sexual inversion" (homosexuality) is apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as typically suffered by "inverts", with predictably debilitating effects. The novel portrays "inversion" as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: "Give us also the right to our existence".

Shortly after the book's publication, it had become the target of a campaign by James Douglas, editor of the ''Sunday Express''. Douglas wrote that "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." A British court judged it obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women"; In England, it would not be published again for another three decades, in 1959. In the United States, the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court.

Publicity over ''The Well of Loneliness''s legal battles increased the visibility of lesbians in British and American culture. For decades it was the best-known lesbian novel in English, and often the first source of information about lesbianism that young people could find. Some readers have valued it, while others have criticised it for Stephen's expressions of self-hatred, and viewed it as inspiring shame. Although critics differ as to the value of ''The Well of Loneliness'' as a work of literature, its treatment of sexuality and gender continues to inspire study and debate.For an overview of critical responses and controversies, see the introduction to , ''Palatable Poison''.

Background

In 1926, Radclyffe Hall was at the height of her career. Her novel ''Adam's Breed'', about the spiritual awakening of an Italian headwaiter, had become a best-seller; it would soon win the Prix Femina and the James Tait Black Prize. She had long thought of writing a novel about sexual inversion; now, she believed, her literary reputation would allow such a work to be given a hearing. Since she knew she was risking scandal and "the shipwreck of her whole career", she sought and received the blessing of her partner, Una Troubridge, before she began work. Her goals were social and political; she wanted to end public silence about homosexuality and bring about "a more tolerant understanding" – as well as to "spur all classes of inverts to make good through hard work...and sober and useful living".

In April 1928 she told her editor that her new book would require complete commitment from its publisher and that she would not allow even one word to be altered. "I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world...So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction." One of the reasons Hall cited for making the book, was that she wanted to be the first person to "smash the conspiracy of silence" about sexual inversion.

Social and cultural context

Paris lesbian and gay subculture

In Hall's time, Paris was known for having a relatively large and visible gay and lesbian community – in part because France, unlike England, had no laws against male homosexuality. Marcel Proust's novels continued in their influence upon 1920s Parisian society depicting lesbian and gay subculture. When Stephen first travels to Paris, at the urging of her friend Jonathan Brockett – who may be based on Noël Coward – she has not yet spoken about her inversion to anyone. Brockett, acting as tour guide, hints at a secret history of inversion in the city by referring to Marie Antoinette's rumoured relationship with the Princesse de Lamballe.

Brockett next introduces Stephen to Valérie Seymour, who – like her prototype, Natalie Clifford Barney – is the hostess of a literary salon, many of whose guests are lesbians and gay men. Immediately after this meeting Stephen announces she has decided to settle in Paris at 35 Rue Jacob (purchased at Seymour's recommendation), with its temple in a corner of an overgrown garden. Barney lived and held her salon at 20 Rue Jacob. Stephen is wary of Valérie, and does not visit her salon until after the war, when Brockett persuades her that Mary is becoming too isolated. She finds Valérie to be an "indestructible creature" capable of bestowing a sense of self-respect on others, at least temporarily: "everyone felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour's". With Stephen's misgivings "drugged", she and Mary are drawn further into the "desolate country" of Paris gay life. At Alec's Bar – the worst in a series of depressing nightspots – they encounter "the battered remnants of men who...despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation".

Many of those familiar with the subculture she described, including her own friends, disagreed with her portrayal of it; Romaine Brooks called her "a digger-up of worms with the pretension of a distinguished archaeologist". Hall's correspondence shows that the negative view of bars like Alec's that she expressed in ''The Well'' was sincerely meant, but she also knew that such bars did not represent the only homosexual communities in Paris. It is a commonplace of criticism that her own experience of lesbian life was not as miserable as Stephen's. By focusing on misery and describing its cause as "ceaseless persecution" by "the so-called just and righteous", she intensified the urgency of her plea for change.

World War I

Although Hall's author's note disclaims any real-world basis for the ambulance unit that Stephen joins, she drew heavily on the wartime experiences of her friend Toupie Lowther, co-commander of the only women's unit to serve on the front in France. Lowther, like Stephen, came from an aristocratic family, adopted a masculine style of dress, and was an accomplished fencer, tennis player, motorist and jujitsu enthusiast. In later years she said the character of Stephen was based on her, which may have been partly true.

In ''The Well of Loneliness'', war work provides a publicly acceptable role for inverted women. The narrative voice asks that their contributions not be forgotten and predicts that they will not go back into hiding: "a battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded". This military metaphor continues later in the novel when inverts in postwar Paris are repeatedly referred to as a "miserable army". Hall invokes the image of the shell-shocked soldier to depict inverts as psychologically damaged by their outcast status: "for bombs do not trouble the nerves of the invert, but rather that terrible silent bombardment from the batteries of God's good people".

Christianity and spiritualism

Hall, who had converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1912, was devoutly religious. She was also a believer in communication with the dead who had once hoped to become a medium – a fact that brought her into conflict with the church, which condemned spiritualism. Both these beliefs made their way into ''The Well of Loneliness''.

Stephen, born on Christmas Eve and named for the first martyr of Christianity, dreams as a child that "in some queer way she sJesus". When she discovers that Collins, object of her childhood crush, has housemaid's knee, she prays that the affliction be transferred to her: "I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus – I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins – I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were". This childish desire for martyrdom prefigures Stephen's ultimate self-sacrifice for Mary's sake. After she tricks Mary into leaving her – carrying out a plan that leads Valérie to exclaim "you were made for a martyr!" – Stephen, left alone in her home, sees the room thronged with inverts, living, dead and unborn. They call on her to intercede with God for them, and finally possess her. It is with their collective voice that she demands of God, "Give us also the right to our existence".

After Stephen reads Krafft-Ebing in her father's library, she opens the Bible at random, seeking a sign, and reads Genesis 4:15, "And the Lord set a mark upon Cain ..." Hall uses the mark of Cain, a sign of shame and exile, throughout the novel as a metaphor for the situation of inverts. Her defence of inversion took the form of a religious argument: God had created inverts, so humanity should accept them. ''The Wells use of religious imagery outraged the book's opponents, but Hall's vision of inversion as a God-given state was an influential contribution to the language of LGBT rights.

Plot summary

The book's protagonist, Stephen Gordon, is born in the late Victorian era to upper-class parents in Worcestershire who are expecting a boy and who christen her with the name they had already chosen. Even at birth she is physically unusual, a "narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby". She hates dresses, wants to cut her hair short, and longs to be a boy. At seven, she develops a crush on a housemaid named Collins, and is devastated when she sees Collins kissing a footman.

Stephen's father, Sir Phillip, dotes on her; he seeks to understand her through the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first modern writer to propose a theory of homosexuality, but does not share his findings with Stephen. Her mother, Lady Anna, is distant, seeing Stephen as a "blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction" of Sir Phillip. At eighteen, Stephen forms a close friendship with a Canadian man, Martin Hallam, but is horrified when he declares his love for her. The following winter, Sir Phillip is crushed by a falling tree; at the last moment he tries to explain to Lady Anna that Stephen is an invert, but dies without managing to do so.

Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbour. Angela uses Stephen as an "anodyne against boredom", allowing her "a few rather schoolgirlish kisses". The pair conduct a relationship that, although not explicitly stated, seems to have some sexual element, at least for Stephen. 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 ngto 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.

Stephen moves to London and writes a well-received first novel. Her second novel is less successful, and her friend the playwright Jonathan Brockett, himself an invert, urges her to travel to Paris to improve her writing through a fuller experience of life. There she makes her first, brief contact with urban invert culture, meeting the lesbian salon hostess Valérie Seymour. During World War I she joins an ambulance unit, eventually serving at the front and earning the Croix de Guerre. She falls in love with a younger fellow driver, Mary Llewellyn, who comes to live with her after the war ends. They are happy at first, but Mary becomes lonely when Stephen returns to writing. Rejected by polite society, Mary throws herself into Parisian nightlife. Stephen believes Mary is becoming hardened and embittered and feels powerless to provide her with "a more normal and complete existence".

Martin Hallam, now living in Paris, rekindles his old friendship with Stephen. In time, he falls in love with Mary. Persuaded that she cannot give Mary happiness, Stephen pretends to have an affair with Valérie Seymour to drive her into Martin's arms. The novel ends with Stephen's plea to God: "Give us also the right to our existence!"

Sexology

Hall describes ''The Well of Loneliness'' as "The first long and very serious novel entirely upon the subject of sexual inversion". She wrote ''The Well of Loneliness'' in part to popularise the ideas of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, who regarded homosexuality as an inborn and unalterable trait: congenital sexual inversion.

In Krafft-Ebing's ''Psychopathia Sexualis'' (1886), the first book Stephen finds in her father's study, inversion is described as a degenerative disorder common in families with histories of mental illness. Exposure to these ideas leads Stephen to describe herself and other inverts as "hideously maimed and ugly". Later texts such as ''Sexual Inversion'' (1896) by Havelock Ellis – who contributed a foreword to ''The Well'' – described inversion simply as a difference, not as a defect. By 1901 Krafft-Ebing had adopted a similar view. Hall championed their ideas over those of the psychoanalysts, who saw homosexuality as a form of arrested psychological development, and some of whom believed it could be changed. Indeed, Havelock Ellis' commentary for the novel, which, although edited and censored to some extent, aligns the novel directly with theories of Sexual Inversion: "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 unresolved problems".

The term sexual inversion implied gender role reversal. Female inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally male pursuits and dress; according to Krafft-Ebing, they had a "masculine soul". Krafft-Ebing believed that the most extreme inverts also exhibited reversal of secondary sex characteristics; Ellis's research had not demonstrated any such physical differences, but he devoted a great deal of study to the search for them. The idea appears in ''The Well'' in Stephen's unusual proportions at birth and in the scene set at Valerie Seymour's salon, where "the timbre of a voice, the build of an ankle, the texture of a hand" reveals the inversion of the guests.

Social impact and legacy

Awareness of homosexuality in society

In 1921, Lord Birkenhead, the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, had opposed a bill that would have criminalised lesbianism on the grounds that "of every thousand women ... 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices". In reality, awareness of lesbianism had been gradually increasing since World War I, but it was still a subject most people had never heard of, or perhaps just preferred to ignore. ''The Well of Loneliness'' made sexual inversion a subject of household conversation for the first time. The banning of the book drew so much attention to the very subject it was intended to suppress that it left British authorities wary of further attempts to censor books for lesbian content. In 1935, after a complaint about a health book entitled ''The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems'', a Home Office memo noted: "It is notorious that the prosecution of the ''Well of Loneliness'' resulted in infinitely greater publicity about lesbianism than if there had been no prosecution."

In a study of a working-class lesbian community in Buffalo, New York, in the 1940s and 1950s, ''The Well of Loneliness'' was the only work of lesbian literature anyone had read or heard of. For many young lesbians in the 1950s, it was the only source of information about lesbianism. ''The Well''s name recognition made it possible to find when bookstores and libraries did not yet have sections devoted to LGBT literature. As late as 1994, an article in ''Feminist Review'' noted that ''The Well'' "regularly appears in coming-out stories – and not just those of older lesbians". It has often been mocked: Terry Castle says that "like many bookish lesbians I seem to have spent much of my adult life making jokes about it", and Mary Renault, who read it in 1938, remembered laughing at its "earnest humourlessness" and "impermissible allowance of self-pity". Yet it has also produced powerful emotional responses, both positive and negative. One woman was so angry at the thought of how ''The Well'' would affect an "isolated emerging lesbian" that she "wrote a note in the library book, to tell other readers that women loving women can be beautiful". A Holocaust survivor said, "Remembering that book, I wanted to live long enough to kiss another woman."

Clothing and sexuality

James Douglas illustrated his denunciation of ''The Well'' with a photograph of Radclyffe Hall in a silk smoking jacket and bow tie, holding a cigarette and monocle. She was also wearing a straight knee-length skirt, but later ''Sunday Express'' articles cropped the photo so tightly that it became difficult to tell she was not wearing trousers. Hall's style of dress was not scandalous in the 1920s; short hairstyles were common, and the combination of tailored jackets and short skirts was a recognised fashion, discussed in magazines as the "severely masculine" look. Some lesbians, like Hall, adopted variations of the style as a way of signalling their sexuality, but it was a code that only a few knew how to read. With the controversy over ''The Well of Loneliness'', Hall became the public face of sexual inversion, and all women who favoured masculine fashions came under new scrutiny. Lesbian journalist Evelyn Irons – who considered Hall's style of dress "rather effeminate" compared to her own – said that after the publication of ''The Well'', truck drivers would call out on the street to any woman who wore a collar and tie: "Oh, you're Miss Radclyffe Hall". Some welcomed their newfound visibility: when Hall spoke at a luncheon in 1932, the audience was full of women who had imitated her look. But in a study of lesbian women in Salt Lake City in the 1920s and '30s, nearly all regretted the publication of ''The Well'' because it had drawn unwanted attention to them.

Negative portrayal of the feminine lesbian

In the 1970s and early '80s, when lesbian feminists rejected the butch and femme identities that Hall's novel had helped to define, writers like Jane Rule and Blanche Wiesen Cook criticised ''The Well'' for defining lesbianism in terms of masculinity, as well as for presenting lesbian life as "joyless".

Furthermore, ''The Well'' arguably embodies what modern readers may regard as misogynistic and biphobic ideas in its presentation of the femme women who experience attraction towards Stephen but eventually end up in heterosexual relationships. Mary's femininity, in particular, is belittled by Hall's presentation of her: She is not Stephen's equal in age, education, family, or wealth, and so is constantly infantilised by her lover. This, coupled with Mary's dependence on Stephen, seems to emphasise the supposed inferiority of the feminine to the masculine. As Clare Hemmings argues, Mary is merely used as "a means for Stephen to reach her own understanding of the true nature of the deviant’s plight".

Moreover, Hemmings continues that both Mary and Angela represent the "'traitorous femme' who remains untrustworthy as she may leave you er female loverfor a man".

Bisexuality

The understanding of sexuality represented in the novel is considered strictly in binary terms and exists within misogynistic stereotypes that were prevalent when the novel was published. This contributes to the undertones of biphobia that are present in the treatment of the femme characters that exhibit female-female sexual attraction, especially so in the treatment of Mary. These choices could be partly explained by the understanding of the term bisexuality at the time. During the interwar period the definition was most often understood as a scientific term describing a psychological gender duality, rather than referencing a sexual preference. In other words, the term was used as a scientific neologism for androgyny, and related to understandings of gender and sex, but not to sexual preferences. Some women in this period ascribed to the theory of Otto Weininger, who suggested that those attracted to others of their own sex were born neither male nor female, but both: they were "sexually intermediate types" This theory posited that "the woman who attracts and is attracted by other women is herself half male" and that "homo-sexuality in a woman is the outcome of her masculinity and presupposes a higher degree of development".

Conflations between sexuality and gender

Other criticism focuses on the potential confusion of sexuality with gender in the novel. Jay Prosser argues that in "rightly tracing Hall’s debt to nineteenth-century sexologists, critics have wrongly reduced sexual inversion to homosexuality." What many refer to as Stephen's ' butch lesbianism', Prosser suggests, is actually a transgender identity. As a child, Stephen insists that she is male – "Yes, of course I'm a boy … I must be a boy 'cause I feel exactly like one", – and, when talking to their mother, Stephen says that, "All my life I’ve never felt like a woman, and you know it." Through Stephen's final rejection of Mary, ostensibly so that Mary can participate in a heterosexual relationship with Martin and therefore have a more secure life, Prosser surmises that "Stephen affirms her identification with the heterosexual man".

Esther Newton, writing in 1989, provides a different perspective of Hall's seemingly confusing depiction of Stephen's lesbianism and its conflation with her gender, hinging her discussion on understanding ''The Well'' in its historical and social context. Newton argues that "Hall and many other feminists like her embraced ..the image of the mannish lesbian ..primarily because they desperately wanted to break out of the asexual model of romantic friendship" prevalent in the nineteenth century. Sex was seen as something that "could only occur in the presence of an imperial and imperious penis", such that sex between women was simply not recognised to exist. Newton shows how sexologists of the time, like Ellis, echoes this sentiment, where his "antifeminism and reluctance to see active lust in women committed him to fusing inversion and masculinity". In a society "very conscious of sex and its vast importance", Stephen feels excluded from the rigid, feminine role imposed on her as a biological female. Hence, for Stephen's lesbianism to be recognised by the readers in that time, Hall had to deliberately show Stephen "enter(ing) the male world, ..as a lesbian in male body drag", which simultaneously enabled the feminine women in the novel to demonstrate their lesbianism through "association with their masculine partners".

The novel has had its defenders among feminists in the academy, such as Alison Hennegan, pointing out that the novel did raise awareness of homosexuality among the British public and cleared the way for later work that tackled gay and lesbian issues.

In more recent criticism, critics have tended to focus on the novel's historical context, but ''The Wells reputation as "''the most depressing'' lesbian novel ever written" persists and is still controversial. Some critics see the book as reinforcing homophobic beliefs, while others argue that the book's tragedy and its depiction of shame are its most compelling aspects.

''The Well''s ideas and attitudes now strike many readers as dated, and few critics praise its literary quality. Nevertheless, it continues to compel critical attention, to provoke strong identification and intense emotional reactions in some readers, and to elicit a high level of personal engagement from its critics.

Publication and contemporary response

Three publishers praised ''The Well'' but turned it down. Hall's agent then sent the manuscript to Jonathan Cape who, though cautious about publishing a controversial book, saw the potential for a commercial success. Cape tested the waters with a small print run of 1500 copies, priced at 15 shillings – about twice the cost of an average novel – to make it less attractive to sensation-seekers. Publication, originally scheduled for late 1928, was brought forward when he discovered that another novel with a lesbian theme, Compton Mackenzie's ''Extraordinary Women'', was to be published in September. Though the two books proved to have little in common, Hall and Cape saw ''Extraordinary Women'' as a competitor and wanted to beat it to market. ''The Well'' appeared on 27 July, in a black cover with a plain jacket. Cape sent review copies only to newspapers and magazines he thought would handle the subject matter non-sensationally.

Early reviews were mixed. Some critics found the novel too preachy; others, including Leonard Woolf, thought it was poorly structured, or complained of sloppiness in style. There was praise for its sincerity and artistry, and some expressed sympathy with Hall's moral argument. In the three weeks after the book appeared in bookstores, no reviewer called for its suppression or suggested that it should not have been published. A review in ''T.P.'s & Cassell's Weekly'' foresaw no difficulties for ''The Well'': "One cannot say what effect this book will have on the public attitude of silence or derision, but every reader will agree with Mr. Havelock Ellis in the preface, that 'the poignant situations are set forth with a complete absence of offence.'"

Papers from the author's archive, which are set to be digitised by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas alongside those of her partner, the artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, show that the novel was supported by thousands of readers, who wrote to Hall in outrage at the ban.

Possible autobiography

Although Hall's childhood bore little resemblance to Stephen's life, in the 1970s and 1980s, some writers such as Hall's early biographers Lovat Dickson and Richard Ormrod had treated ''The Well of Loneliness'' as a thinly veiled autobiography. Angela Crossby may be a composite of various women with whom Hall had affairs in her youth, but Mary, whose lack of outside interests leaves her idle when Stephen is working, does not resemble Hall's partner Una Troubridge, an accomplished sculptor who translated Colette's novels into English. Hall said she drew on herself only for the "fundamental emotions that are characteristic of the inverted".

''Sunday Express'' campaign

James Douglas, editor of the ''Sunday Express'', did not agree. Douglas was a dedicated moralist and an exponent of muscular Christianity, a movement which sought to reinvigorate the Church of England by promoting physical health and manliness. His colourfully worded editorials on subjects such as "the flapper vote" (that is, the extension of suffrage to women under 30) and "modern sex novelists" helped the ''Express'' family of papers prosper in the cutthroat circulation wars of the late 1920s. These leader articles (editorials) shared the pages of the ''Sunday Express'' with gossip, murderers' confessions, and features about the love affairs of great men and women of the past.

Douglas's campaign against ''The Well of Loneliness'' began on 18 August, with poster and billboard advertising and a teaser in the ''Daily Express'' promising to expose "A Book That Should Be Suppressed". In his editorial the next day, Douglas wrote that " sexual inversion and perversion" had already become too visible and that the publication of ''The Well'' brought home the need for society to "cleans itself from the leprosy of these lepers". For Douglas the sexological view of homosexuality was pseudoscience, incompatible with the Christian doctrine of free will; instead, he argued, homosexuals were damned by their own choice – which meant that others could be corrupted by "their propaganda". Above all, children must be protected: "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul." He called on the publishers to withdraw the book and the Home Secretary to take action if they did not. (The comparison between pornography and poison was made by Lord Chief Justice, Lord Campbell, on introducing the Obscene Publications Act 1857.)

In what Hall described as an act of "imbecility coupled with momentary panic", Jonathan Cape sent a copy of ''The Well'' to the Home Secretary for his opinion, offering to withdraw the book if it would be in the public interest to do so. The Home Secretary was William Joynson-Hicks, a Conservative known for his crackdowns on alcohol, nightclubs and gambling, as well as for his opposition to a revised version of ''The Book of Common Prayer''. He took only two days to reply that ''The Well'' was "gravely detrimental to the public interest"; if Cape did not withdraw it voluntarily, criminal proceedings would be brought.

Cape announced that he had stopped publication, but he secretly leased the rights to Pegasus Press, an English-language publisher in France. His partner Wren Howard took papier-mâché moulds of the type to Paris, and by 28 September, Pegasus Press was shipping its edition to the London bookseller Leopold Hill, who acted as distributor. With publicity increasing demand, sales were brisk, but the reappearance of ''The Well'' on bookshop shelves soon came to the attention of the Home Office. On 3 October Joynson-Hicks issued a warrant for shipments of the book to be seized.

One consignment of 250 copies was stopped at Dover. Then the Chairman of the Board of Customs balked. He had read ''The Well'' and considered it a fine book, not at all obscene; he wanted no part of suppressing it. On 19 October he released the seized copies for delivery to Leopold Hill's premises, where the Metropolitan Police were waiting with a search warrant. Hill and Cape were summoned to appear at Bow Street Magistrates' Court to show cause why the book should not be destroyed.

Response

From its beginning, the ''Sunday Express''s campaign drew the attention of other papers. Some backed Douglas, including the ''Sunday Chronicle'', ''The People'' and ''Truth''. The ''Daily News and Westminster Gazette'' ran a review that, without commenting on Douglas's action, said the novel "present das a martyr a woman in the grip of a vice". Most of the British press defended ''The Well''. ''The Nation'' suggested that the ''Sunday Express'' had only started its campaign because it was August, the journalistic silly season when good stories are scarce. '' Country Life'' and '' Lady's Pictorial'' both ran positive reviews. Arnold Dawson of the '' Daily Herald'', a Labour newspaper, called Douglas a "stunt journalist"; he said no one would give the book to a child, no child would want to read it, and any who did would find nothing harmful. Dawson also printed a scathing condemnation of the Home Office by H. G. Wells

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