Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

PRVI PRAVI LEZBEJSKI ROMAN
438 STR

The Well of Loneliness is a lesbian novel by British author Radclyffe Hall that was first published in 1928 by Jonathan Cape.[a] 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 during the First World War, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as the typical sufferings of `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`.[2]

Shortly after the book`s publication, it became 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`;[3] not until 1949, twenty years later, was it again published in England.[4][5][6] In the United States, the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court.[7]

Publicity over The Well of Loneliness`s legal battles increased the visibility of lesbians in British and American culture.[8] 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.[9] Some readers have valued it, while others have criticised it for Stephen`s expressions of self-hatred, and viewed it as inspiring shame.[10] The novel was subject to great criticism in its time (some of which may have been motivated by prejudice) but has come to be recognised as a classic of queer literature.[11]

The book entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.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`.[68] 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.[69] The Well of Loneliness made sexual inversion a subject of household conversation for the first time.[70] 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.`[71]

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.[72] For many young lesbians in the 1950s, it was the only source of information about lesbianism.[73] The Well`s name recognition made it possible to find when bookstores and libraries did not yet have sections devoted to LGBT literature.[74] 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`.[75] 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`.[76] 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`.[77] A Holocaust survivor said, `Remembering that book, I wanted to live long enough to kiss another woman.`[78]
LEZBEJKE, GEJ, GAY, LGBT, HOMOSEKSUALNOST