Book Review: The Well of Lonelinss
- Al Preston
- Mar 11
- 37 min read
By Al Preston
Warnings: Talk of animal death, suicide, and homophobia.
Since I began reading and listening to the oral histories of queer folks, I’ve heard about the books they’ve read that inspired them and made them feel less lonely. One of those books was The Well of Loneliness by Radclyff Hall. I’ve heard about this book in multiple oral histories and have heard about Hall as a prolific queer author. This book, despite being banned and unbanned many times in the US, was a really popular lesbian romance from the 1920s.
It’s also horribly difficult to get ahold of. You can find the digital Italian version easily on Amazon. You can also find a bunch of people writing about this book and its impact and even Hall’s controversial history. Otherwise, it’s difficult to find the original English version of this book. I was so grateful that my sister gifted the book to me for Christmas. She had originally scoffed at my warnings about how difficult finding the book was until she went searching herself.
She was able to locate a reprint from 2024 which only had a limited number of copies. There’s no forward or information in this book from those who reprinted it. I’m going to take it mostly at face value as a genuine reprint with no edits or changes from the original text as that is what it appears to be.
It’s rare for me, at this time, to read for fun or read fiction books, as you can probably tell from the long list of non-fiction books on this website. This book has also been something I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. Something that has motivated me to research queer history is a drive to find myself in history, to find people like me throughout time. Pittsburgh has been somewhere I’ve found people, historical and modern, that I really understand and relate to.
Reading the stories of queer activists was one way for me to find others like me. I wondered where these activists found themselves and others like them and so many talked about books. Stories that focused on queer people and experiences, even if they never ended happily. Between the pages of The Well of Loneliness specifically, these activists realized that they weren’t the only people in the world with these feelings.
That experience of finding something familiar speaks to me deeply. This book has inspired many activists and average queer folks since it was published. It was the first time those people, ironically, felt a little less lonely. So many believed that they were the only strange person on the Earth, which made the main character, Stephen Gordon (she/her) incredibly relatable to them as she grew and struggled with knowing that there was ‘something wrong’ with her but not knowing what.
For this review, I’ll begin with the author, Radclyff Hall and then dive deep into the book itself. Since this book is difficult to get ahold of, I will be more in depth in my review of the plot but I will also be a bit more silly in my review of the content because this is a fiction book and there were many moments where I gasp out loud or laughed far too hard at a moment or scene. This is a long, almost dense book and I have so much to say!
Radclyff Hall is the picture of a 1920s queer person. As Hall didn’t tell people to use he/him pronouns but clearly asked to be referred to as ‘John’ and didn’t have the same language as we do about gender and sexuality, I’ll just refer to this author by Hall.
As you can see, Hall dressed in suits and pants like a man, wore short hair and clearly had some thoughts on gender. Hall loved women and have multiple female partners over Hall’s lifetime. Havelock Ellis, a well-known sexologist at the time, encouraged Hall to have relationships with women and to dress how Hall felt the most comfortable. Hall self-identified as a ‘third sex’ which was a common way for butch lesbians, feminine gay men, intersex people, and transgender folks to be identified at this time.
Hall was born on August 12, 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Her mother, Marie, was American and her father, Radclyff, was British. They divorced when Hall was two. Marie and Hall didn’t fully get along much of Hall’s young life so, when Hall was given a large inheritance from a paternal grandfather, Hall left home to make a life elsewhere.
Throughout Hall’s life, poetry and writing was a skill Hall carefully crafted. In 1906, Hall published a first book of poems, “Twixt Earth and the Stars.” Shortly after that, in 1907, Hall met Mabel Batten, a much older, married woman and the two of them had a romantic relationship (she eventually divorced her husband). Batten encouraged Hall to keep writing and helped Hall to convert to Catholicism. Once World War I hit, they remained in England and Hall started writing fiction.
In 1915, Hall met Una Troubridge, Batten’s cousin, Hall’s relationship with Troubridge would be the relationship that would last the rest of Hall’s life. Troubridge was also a married woman with a child. Batten was still alive at this time, and this awkward relationship caused all three of them problems until Batten died in 1916.
Despite the tension, Hall and Troubridge became interested in spiritualism at this time, which was pretty popular. Spiritualism in the 1910s to 1920s era are where ghost hunting and seances from today got their start. Typically, women would claim that they could contact the dead and speak for them. These women would back their claims with illusions and tricks. A famous set of twins would crack their toes extremely loudly and claim that the noise was knocks from ghosts.
Many people fully believed that these women could actually summon ghosts, others tried to disprove them. Regardless, Hall and Troubridge fully believed that the seances they attended allowed Batten to give them advice from beyond the grave.
Troubridge and her husband, in 1919, agreed to a legal separation so that she and Hall could have a more official and settled life together. At that time, Hall started writing novels, starting with The Unlit Lamp. Hall had other works like The Forge and A Saturday Life. Hall and Troubridge were well known in the lesbian literary world and were friends with multiple other lesbian writers.
All of this led to Hall beginning to write The Well of Loneliness which was Hall’s first work that was explicitly lesbian. Which, of course, led to complaints about such an ‘immoral’ work being published. Trials were fast to follow, and the book was banned for being obscene despite there being no sex within the book.
That didn’t stop Hall from writing more books. Near the end of Hall’s life, a nurse of Troubridge, Evgenia Souline, began an affair with Hall which caused tensions with Troubridge.
On October 6th, 1943, Hall died from cancer at the age of sixty-three.
All said and done, Hall had a pretty turbulent life of love, lesbianism, and writing. She was a devout Catholic and clearly felt troubled by her gender and sexual orientation. Those struggles are only made clearer when it comes to The Well of Loneliness. It’s really obvious that Hall put a lot of her own thoughts, feelings, and life experience into this book. Which, I will now get into. Reviewing this book may get a bit off the rails as I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it. As I write this sentence, I know that it’s going to be a long one too, so I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read this!
With that, let’s start in on the book itself. Which will contain spoilers. Do head the warnings at the top of the post.
Our main character is Stephen Gordon. Yes, that is a boy’s name. No, Stephen is not transgender or anything like that although she definitely struggles with her gender. This book goes from Stephen’s birth to—I hesitate to say death, but we’ll get there.
For a quick note, each of the 56 chapters are split up into counted sections. The highest number of these breaks I saw was eight. I bring this up because I may reference parts of the book by chapter and section number. The book is also divided into five ‘books’ which cover different times in Stephen’s life.
So, chapter one section one, we begin with Stephen’s parents, Sir Phillip and Anna. These two genuinely love each other and they live in the Morton estate in England. This is, to the best I can assume as it’s not described, a huge mansion out in the country. There are rolling hills, forests, and a small village as well as a bunch of other rich people with their own mansions.
Anna is pregnant and both she and Sir Phillip believe that the baby will be a boy. Excited, they pick only a boy’s name and Sir Phillip talks all about the education he will ensure his son will have and that the boy will fence and ride horses. While neither of them brings up the fact that a son will be able to continue the family’s legacy, Stephen as an adult does so I suppose that is also implied in their preference for a son.
In section two, however, we find out that Anna gave birth to a girl. While Anna is a bit upset, Sir Phillip isn’t at all. He’s so thrilled to be a father and to help raise this young child, regardless of gender. Since they had been calling the baby Stephen so much before she was born, he suggests keeping the name for their child.
This section also hints at Anna’s future attitude towards Stephen. She has some level of disappointment that she had a girl, but she did just give birth to this baby, and she has her own visions of what Stephen would be as a woman. However, for a moment, she has some repulsion or doubt about their child. She shakes it off…but not for long. Before the end of chapter one, Anna is struggling with the fact that her daughter looks a lot like her father.
It’s brought up a lot throughout the first part that Stephen looks a lot like her father. It’s kind of implied that this means that she looks strange with stereotypically feminine fashion. She has a sharp jaw that seems to be square, and has her father’s hair which is suggested to look better in short men’s styles. This bothers her mother because she feels like Stephen doesn’t look feminine or—at least—look like her at all. It’s kind of like that meme of a woman holding up a baby complaining that she spent nine months being pregnant and her child ‘looks like her stupid father’ while showing said happy stupid father looking like a goober at the end of the bed?
That’s exactly it. Except, it’s not a joke to Anna. It bothers her and she feels like a bad mother because she’s coming to hate her daughter because of it. To her, something feels wrong and strange, but she doesn’t know what. Sir Phillip met Anna in the rural country of Ireland and she seemed to come from a family the did not well educate their daughters. This leads to her being close-minded while Sir Phillip, who is said to be well educated, is far more open-minded.
These underlining issues continue throughout Stephen’s childhood. Sir Phillip adores his child and plays with her and teaches her. He also lets her get away with doing a lot more masculine things, much to Anna’s annoyance. Sir Phillip lets Stephen ride horses straddling them (normally, girls would be taught to ride side saddle), lets her participate in fox hunts, and makes sure she’s well educated and is allowed to fence.
While you may think it’s because he wanted a son before, I don’t think it is. Characters’ motivations and beliefs are very bluntly stated in this book. Point of view jumps around a lot throughout, but if Stephen was to suspect another character of a particular motivation, Hall immediately tells the reader if that suspicion is right or wrong. Side note: if randomly switching point of view within a narrative bothers you, I don’t recommend reading this. I don’t think there was a point where the narrative only took place in one person’s point of view for the entire section.
Back on topic, I think Sir Phillip would love Stephen if she was masculine or feminine, and he was well aware that there is something ‘different’ about his child. He even has a book about inversion—a term used between the 1880s and 1920s to describe some people with same-sex feelings or ‘unusual’ gender feelings—that he eventually reads and realizes describes his child perfectly. A fact he is never disgusted or upset by, but worried about what it will mean for Stephen.
Now, I’m going to jump tracks here a little bit to talk about history. Back in the 1920s, there were a lot of theories posited about why someone would become an ‘invert’. One of those theories was that if the child’s parents wanted one gender or another too much before the child was born, those thoughts and feelings would reach the child in their mother’s stomach. As their gender was already decided, they could become inverts once born as the opposite of the desired gender.
Sir Phillip’s book about inversion is by a well-known sexologist, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. He did write some of the kinder books about this subject at the time. Kinder theorists suggested allowing the child to explore what makes them an invert. In other words, if a daughter wanted to hunt or ride horses, she should be allowed. So, Sir Phillip encouraged her enjoyment of masculine gendered hobbies and even gifted her a really good horse, Raferty that Stephen loves very deeply and who has his own point of view in this story—I’ll get to that later.
While Sir Phillip is a genuinely loving parent and he’s doing his best for his child, he’s also kind of stupid and bad at communicating anything, mostly because he doesn’t want to upset or hurt anyone…a theme that will haunt the some of the characters for the rest of the book. Specifically, Stephen, Sir Phillip, and Puddle, Stephen’s teacher who stays with her for a huge amount of her young adulthood.
In this section of the book that covers Stephen’s childhood, Sir Phillip never tells anyone, not Stephen, not Anna, not even Puddle who is also aware of Stephen’s inversion (I keep using this term because it is the term that Stephen identifies with) about what he knows.
Not going to lie, this first part feels like it takes forever and is a little boring. There are really only two interesting things in this section other than really building up Anna’s dislike of her child and showing how Stephen was raised.
The first bit is that a very young and childish Stephen gets a crush on one of the maids, Collins. She becomes obsessive over Collins, wanting to take her pains away and get all of her attention. All the while, Stephen plays pretend as the character ‘Nelson’ from some of the adventure stories Sir Phillip read her. Collins gives Stephen positive attention for playing Nelson which boosts Stephen’s love of the act. Being Nelson also makes Stephen feel more ‘normal’ and she often prayed to be a boy instead of a girl.
Now, Collins’s part of the story ends suddenly when Stephen discovers Collins kissing a man behind a shed. Enraged by seeing this, Stephen grabs a pot and throws it at them, hitting the man in the head. Sir Phillip talks to Stephen about this, and Stephen tells him that she loved Collins and was just so upset that she was kissing a man. That she was upset that she couldn’t be a man herself, which causes Sir Phillip to read Ulrichs books.
He also fires and sends Collins and her boyfriend away and gets Stephen a new teacher, a French woman who comes back later but doesn’t really affect the story, even when she returns to the story later on. When she leaves, Puddle comes to teach Stephen and really shapes her as an intellectual and person, even helping her control the anger she was known for as a child.
The other interesting moment is when Stephen is older. There are few other children Stephen’s age near Morton. The two she saw the most frequently were Violet and Roger Antrim. They are the children of Sir Antrim, a general who often says bigoted and racist things, except when someone insults Stephen’s abilities as a hunter…then he doesn’t seem to care that she’s a woman and doing a masculine hobby. He just couldn’t help but appreciate the skill that goes into being a good rider and hunter. At least he’s consistent.
His children are kind of awful people. Violet cries at literally everything and wants nothing more than to be a wife and mother and constantly insults Stephen for wanting anything else while Roger is a bully who is more than willing to physically hurt Stephen or his sister. However, when they’re older, he returns to Morton with a friend, Martin.
Martin is a simple man. He likes trees, he owns a lot of land in Canada where he can really enjoy old trees. He and Stephen get along really well. He doesn’t care that Stephen is a little strange and enjoys men’s hobbies, he actually thinks it’s great. They bond over Stephen’s home and the forests and fields. They become great friends and, for the first time, Anna and the others in town who have looked at Stephen with suspicion her whole life, believe that she’s finally normal.
They, and even Martin, believe that they’re falling in love. Martin, so impassioned by his realization of his love for Stephen, confesses to her and asks her to marry him. Stephen is totally blindsided by this confession. She thought she finally had a friend that liked her. She had no romantic feelings for him at all.
In her shock, she says no and runs away. Martin, embarrassed and upset, just leaves. He fully walks away, gets on his train, then boat, and goes all the way back to Canada without saying anything to anyone. According to the narrative, he maintains his shocked look the entire trip.
This marks Stephen as a weirdo to everyone in town for the rest of forever and embarrasses her mother, more than her father. It also leads to Stephen to think deeply about her own strangeness far more and feeling like perhaps there is something wrong with her.
Additionally, this is the first time Puddle curses God for making Stephen ‘so strange’. It’s heavily implied that Puddle, a very old woman even at this point in the story, is also a lesbian who chose to pursue neither men nor women. She understands Stephen really well and knows what she’s going through, but it’s never said outright that Puddle is also a lesbian. In fact, it’s about the only piece of information we’re never directly given and left to assume.
This first part of the book ends—and I hate to say it like this—with the goofiest death. A Perfect example of a Soap Opera death. I genuinely laughed out loud.
It’s winter and Anna’s favorite tree is covered in a lot of snow. She worries the branches will break and tells Sir Phillip, who as a very hands-on boss and loving husband, leads some of his employees over to the tree and helps them clear off the snow.
One of the branches couldn’t take the weight and Sir Phillip wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. The branch lands on him, his staff hurry to get a doctor while bringing him into the house. He gasps and wheezes for some time since the snow had made travel nearly impossible. The doctor eventually comes and says there’s little they can do, so Stephen and Anna sit with him in his last moments.
In that moment, after spending a long time fully able to speak and say things to both Stephen and Anna while they waited for the doctor, he decides to try and tell Anna what’s wrong with Stephen and dies.
Like—I kid you not—he raises his hand and starts to speak, then his head falls back and he dies. I laughed—I hate to admit it—I laughed. I was so startled by that death that I laughed. I can’t help but feel Sir Phillip’s death was just so silly and strange. It belongs to a Soap Opera.
That ends part one and brings us to a few years later in part two. Stephen and her mother have a simple peace in their home. They don’t really talk, they don’t bother each other. They just exist in the same home. Puddle acts as a go between the two of them after failing to convince Stephen to go study in London like Sir Phillip wanted.
They’re both rather depressed after Sir Phillip’s death, understandably, so they don’t do much. Stephen can’t even bring herself to hunt anymore because she felt too horrible about killing the fox. However, without her mother paying her much mind, Stephen was free to dress and act however she wanted. She cut her hair and gets suits and pants tailored to fit her.
This section is entirely about Stephen’s first love as a young adult, and I mean young adult. She’s, to my estimates, anywhere between 18 and 22 in this section, which is kind of important later (at least to me).
Anyway, this scene, so quickly following the goofy death of Sir Phillip is an equally as goofy meet-cute with Angela Crossby.
Stephen is driving through town when she sees a baker’s large dog fighting with a small yappy dog. The small dog’s owner, Angela Crossby, and the baker are trying to separate them unsuccessfully while Angela screams for help for her dog, Tony.
Stephen stops her car, leaps from it to grab both dogs by the scruff and separates them. She helps Angela take Tony to a Vet and then takes her home and is instantly smitten.
Angela is the wife of Ralph Crossby. They bought one of the mansions and they’re not very well liked by the rest of the town. Angela is an American and rumored to be an actor. Those rumors are only kind of correct. Angela was born to a once wealthy plantation family in the American South.
They were made poor during the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. Without a lot of options, Angela had to take on odd jobs and eventually became, essentially, a prostitute until Ralph found her and asked her to marry him. Ralph isn’t a great guy, however. He’s jealous and particular. He insults Angela all of the time and seems paranoid that she will cheat on him.
He’s not wrong about that. Angela, in the time she spends in this book, cheats on him twice, once with Stephen. Notably, she is also much older than Stephen. In the brief moments we get her point of view, she calls Stephen a kid more than once.
So, after that ridiculous dog rescue, Stephen is fascinated with Angela and visits her often. Puddle kind of warns against it but goes ignored and Anna doesn’t bother with Stephen to begin with so she’s completely unaware of most of this until the end of this section.
Two things are clear from Angela and Stephen interacting in this whole section. One is that Stephen has a type; feminine women who need helped/saved/taken care of. Something that is highlighted later on as a very masculine part of who Stephen is. The other thing is that Angela hates her husband but likes the riches and security he brings and will do absolutely anything to risk that even if it completely destroys another person’s life.
Stephen loves Angela fully and completely, doing small things for her, giving her expensive gifts, and begging her to leave her husband and be with her fully instead. Angela likes the attention and the gifts, even if she rejects some of them at first, but will absolutely not leave her husband, especially not for Stephen who could not marry her or provide for her like a husband could.
That notion that, as a woman, Stephen could never marry the women she’s come to love or that she will never fulfill everything a female partner may need haunts her for the rest of the book and seems to be almost a theme as well. The notion, which was fully believed when this book was published, that queer relationships would always be missing something and would never be fulfilling to those within the relationship because of that missing thing.
Anyway, Angela leads Stephen along. I don’t know if they have sex, there’s never once a depiction or a lead up to possible sex, but I kind of assume they did because at one point Stephen and Angela just lay in a bed together after fading in from black. Regardless, Stephen puts her everything into loving Angela. Including buying a really expensive pearl ring from a jeweler who knew her father.
This is an interesting scene. The jeweler recognizes Stephen as her father’s daughter instantly and tells Stephen a story about how her father came to him and asked for a piece of jewelry with pearls on it specifically for Stephen’s mother Anna. Sir Phillip chose pearls because they symbolized the perfection and innocence of Anna. Moved, Stephen buys the ring to give Angela for her birthday. I thought this may have come up again later, but it didn’t.
Anyway, this affair with Angela continues for some time. During one vacation Ralph and Angela take, they happen to meet Roger Antrim. As soon as Angela tells Stephen that she met Roger, I knew that Angela was going to probably have an affair with him…and I was right.
The end of the affair comes after Stephen leaves Angela’s one of the days that Ralph was away visiting his mother. Angela has her leave because she claims to have a migraine. In her gut, Stephen worries and eventually goes back to the house and discovers Roger and Angela making out in the garden.
She returns to her home furious and upset and devastated. She writes a letter ending their relationship but also admitting to being in love with Angela. Angela, who saw Stephen go, acts quickly the moment she gets Stephen’s letter. Afraid that Stephen will tell Ralph about her multiple affairs—something Stephen wasn’t thinking of doing—she takes the letter to Ralph herself and tells him that Stephen has been harassing her and uses the letter as ‘proof’.
Ralph then writes a letter to Anna, attaching Stephen’s letter. He tells her that Stephen is banned from returning to their home and that they would never return to theirs. Anna calls Stephen to her and says some pretty horrible things to Stephen.
The animosity Anna had been holding back since Stephen was a child comes out full force. She even says that she’d rather Stephen be dead than embarrass her, which is a horrifying thing to say to your child. She also claims that Stephen has disgraced Sir Phillip, which is a piece of cruel irony for the reader as we’re the only ones, still, who know that Sir Phillip was aware and didn’t care that Stephen was an invert.
Anna banishes Stephen from Morton, her home and the place she loves the most, with the agreement that Stephen could only return once a year to maintain the appearance that she wasn’t banished or an embarrassment to her mother. Stephen, knowing that she has made a big mess of things, agrees without arguing.
Anna allows Stephen to take whatever she wants from Morton and promises to pay her rent and such wherever she ends up going. She even sends Puddle with Stephen to, probably, keep her in check. Entirely for appearances sake. Stephen, after this horrible conversation, goes to her father’s old study to morn and discovers his books about inverts and realizes that Sir Phillip knew all along. So, she takes those books, her horse Raferty, and Puddle and leaves. Just like Sir Phillip, Stephen decides she knows best and doesn’t tell Anna about the book.
While I do understand why Stephen doesn’t tell Anna, they just had an awful conversation, but I can’t understand Sir Phillip’s reasoning. I don’t even think he knew why he didn’t tell her. Hall hints that had Anna been told, then she would have acted differently. I’m not sure that’s true, but Hall wrote these characters and would know better.
This section is perhaps the hardest to read but also really endeared me to Stephen. She feels like the naïve young person that she is, pulled along by her emotions instead of logic. I felt really bad for her and was upset by Anna’s words.
Reading about Stephen being sent away from her home, this place she really loves, is heartbreaking. The first really heartbreaking moment of the book after two really goofy scenes. Anna is harsh and cruel, like the guilt over not loving Stephen has faded away entirely at this point. It is, however, really realistic. Most people wouldn’t be very happy with their child being queer. Honestly, I think this entire section would be the most relatable to many queer folks, especially in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when the book wasn’t actively banned and read relatively widely.
Many activists have stories of similar young adult hoods. They fall for older people with far more to lose and a lot of paranoia. Those relationships don’t tend to end well or could be really abusive. Some led to these young adults being discovered as queer by their families who instantly reject them and send them away.
There’s also an important realization that Stephen comes to before the end of this part. After she read her father’s book about inverts, she finds his old bible, and it falls open to the story of Cain and Abel. This story is the cause of a lot of racism historically speaking. The story of Cain and Abel is about two brothers who do different farming tasks. Abel is the shepherd for a flock of sheep and Cain farms. They both offer their best products to God and God prefers Abel’s offering.
This enrages Cain who kills Abel. Cain is then marked by God as sinful and evil. Cain leaves and there are many theories about what happened to him. Some eugenists of the 1920s believed that the ‘mark’ God placed upon Cain was black skin and Cain went to Africa. This was a way for them to justify their racism.
However, Stephen reads this story and about the mark placed upon Cain and takes the message more widely to mean that all who sin or are abandoned by God, are marked just like Cain. Those who are marked are destined for misery and unhappiness. She sees herself, therefore, as marked.
Section three begins two years after part two. Stephen and Puddle are living in an apartment in London. Stephen is an author and in those two years wrote and published one really good book and is now struggling to write another.
Stephen is miserable. She doesn’t want to go out and talk to anyone or make friends. Writing has been extremely difficult because Stephen misses Morton. Her first book was written on the tragic feelings she had at being banished from her home. Now that she’s written out her feelings, there’s nothing left to write in another book.
While she’s brought Raferty, her faithful horse, and rides him every day, they both hate the compact, dirty air of the city and miss the rolling hills of Morton. Here’s where I’ll explain the point of view of animals in this book. We get two animal points of view, one of which is Raferty.
As much as Stephen loves her horse, her horse loves her and sees her as a God. Raferty is intelligent enough to hold, basically, conversations with Stephen. They promise to take care of each other to the end when they first meet. Raferty hates the city and is equally as upset as Stephen about the banishment, but he tries his best to make her happy when they go out.
However, at this point Raferty is an old horse. In the second chapter of part three, Raferty gets ill. Stephen instantly has him crated and sits with him as they take a train back to Morton where, up until this point, Stephen had been holding to her agreement with her mother to visit once a year. They arrive, Stephen has Raferty taken out to a field, grabs her father’s gun, and kills Raferty.
This was rough. I was so upset.
Since Raferty appeared and Hall made such a point of saying how much Stephen loved this horse, I knew something bad was going to happen to Raferty. By the time I got to part three, I assumed I was being paranoid…and then Stephen shoots Raferty because he was sick and it would end his suffering.
That was awful and I didn’t want to really mention it other than giving everyone a warning that it happens. However, this moment is important for two reasons. One that matters to the story and another that doesn’t end up mattering.
The first is that, without Raferty, Stephen believes there is absolutely nothing tying her to Morton anymore. She doesn’t want to come back to Morton every year. As she goes to leave, Anna is surprised and Stephen tells her that she’s never returning.
This is the second important part, to me not so much the story. Anna accepts Stephen’s decision with a bit of melancholy. Knowing how much Stephen loved Raferty, she feels empathetic towards Stephen and even asks if she would like for a stone to be placed over Raferty’s grave. Stephen, distraught and believing she would never return, tells her mother to do as she pleases.
In this moment, it seems like Anna has a lot of regret for how she treated her daughter but still lets her leave. Perhaps too prideful to try and make amends. She does, however, have a stone made for Raferty’s grave. It’s a throw away line later in the book when Stephen had to return to Morton briefly, but it says so much about Anna. If she really hated her daughter, she wouldn’t have gone through the effort to give her horse’s grave a stone. Yet, she cannot reconcile with her daughter’s queerness, even later in the story. Anna and Stephen’s relationship and feeling towards each other are complicated, very complicated. However, it’s not really explored which is a bit of a shame to me.
Stephen returns to London more miserable than she was before. Puddle worries deeply about her but also can’t get her to go out or stop smoking. This is when we’re introduced to Jonathan Brockett. She met him when Raferty was alive and she and he were both riding horses in the morning.
He introduced himself to her and then proceeded to never leave her alone, for the most part. Brockett is a playwright who disappears when his money from the last play he wrote runs dry. His attention is also easily distracted, but he genuinely likes Stephen and comes back to England to see her a few times.
When Raferty gets sick, he was off writing another play. When he returns, he is genuinely empathetic and worried about her feelings. Stephen, more or less, just puts up with Brockett. Puddle is suspicious of him at first, but then he charms her with gifts and kindness. Her suspicion comes from the fact that she can tell that he is a gay man which is confirmed by the narrative as well. She fears that Stephen will be undone by being around too many other queer people who have a tendency to be self-destructive in her view.
Honestly, I felt like Brockett got the short end of the stick in this book. He seemed like a fine person who cares about his friends. Few characters get a constant description except for Brockett. Every time he appears on page—at least once in that time—his ‘womanly’ hands are brought up. I think it’s because Stephen is bothered by their appearance as much as she is by Brockett himself.
Despite that, Brockett makes himself her friend and she keeps him around because he is one of the few people who is honest with her and tells her when she’s being unreasonable. To Puddle’s surprise, she listens to Brockett as well. After Raferty dies, Brockett convinces Stephen to visit Paris with him, which is his longtime home.
She agrees and Brockett drags her and Puddle all over Paris. Puddle, who is very old at this point, struggles to keep up, but is glad that Stephen is getting out, even if she still doesn’t fully trust Brockett. Eventually, Brockett introduces Stephen to his friend Valérie Seymour who is a famous woman in the city who is an intellectual and welcomes troubled artists into her home for parties. They’re not allowed to drink while there, Valérie doesn’t like alcohol, but they are able to talk to each other and connect and hopefully be able to pursue their art because of that. Notably, most of the artists welcome at Valérie’s are queer in some way. Transgender women, lesbians, gay men, and transgender men. Valérie herself has been pursued by a bunch of men, but she is a lesbian and has a revolving door of female lovers, many of them formerly married women.
Valérie lets Stephen know about a house for sale nearby. Stephen, who is seeing people like her being free to be themselves for the first time, impulsively buys that house and moves in. She is about 27 at this time.
A year or so after moving into the cottage, Stephen’s former French teacher sees her on the street, and they strike up a relatively good friendship. This isn’t that important, honestly. This teacher and her blind sister come up a few times, mostly for foreshadowing reasons. The blind sister is implied to have a mythical wisdom due to her blindness that is used to foreshadow the future of the book for just the reader.
This, I think, is the shortest part of the book. It ends with World War One beginning. Part four talks about what Puddle and Stephen were doing about two years into the war. Puddle helps with getting information across England, specifically between Anna and Stephen. Morton has been turned into a field hospital, more or less. Meanwhile, Stephen is working as a nurse in England and begs whoever will listen to let her go be a nurse on the front.
Eventually, she and a small group of other women, are allowed to go to France and work as ambulance drivers. This is when Stephen meets Mary Llewellyn. Mary is a Celt and orphan who wanted to come work on the front to get away from her little town and her extended family that took care of her. She’s young, I think the age gap between her and Stephen is about 8 years. Mary’s family didn’t waste efforts on educating her a in a significant way so she’s implied to be pretty naïve at this time.
She takes the place of one of the other drivers on the front who got injured badly while trying to load soldiers into the ambulance. By the time we as readers meet Mary, Stephen had known her for a number of weeks, which is a very different introduction to Angela. I assume that the goofiness was reduced due to the fact that World War One is a really serious time and Hall lived through it. By the time this book was written, World War One was only a decade in the past at most and World War Two wasn’t fully in anyone’s mind yet.
At first, Stephen found Mary annoying for being innocent, young, and naïve, so much like herself when she first met Angela Crosby. Despite being less than a decade apart, Stephen calls her ‘kid’ for a while. I think the age difference between them is so great because Stephen was able to go out into the world and was educated and Mary was not.
Regardless, Stephen doesn’t dislike Mary for long. She has a type after all, and a slightly helpless and innocent Mary fulfills it. Stephen’s protective nature and growing love for Mary becomes so prominent that their leader, a wife of a general, has to tell Stephen to help the other women in the unit.
The only other notable thing about the war is that Stephen gets hit by some shrapnel at some point, leaving a scar on her cheek but not injuring her enough to make her leave the front. At the war’s end, Stephen is awarded for her work by the French government. She and Mary also talk about how much they are both obsessed with each other.
Mary begs Stephen to let her stay with her when she returns to her cottage in Paris. Stephen, of course, tells her she can and they admit they love each other for the first time. We really sped run this relationship, I think because of the war, but Stephen has had a history of falling for women hard and fast.
When Stephen and Puddle reunite, Stephen tells Puddle to go back to Morton to help care for Anna, who Stephen assumes will struggle after the war. Puddle is hesitant but agrees in the end.
Mary and Stephen return to Paris at the beginning of the final part of the book. Mary collects birds and a small dog that they name David. Much like Raferty with Stephen, David sees Mary as a Goddess (I will note that Raferty called Stephen ‘God’ specifically). Which instantly made me worry that he was going to die. He doesn’t…I think—I’ll get there.
Anyway, Stephen goes back to writing and being a hermit. Mary was supposed to take over caring for their home, but there’s little for her to do. Rapidly, she becomes bored and has no one else to talk to. Stephen doesn’t go out often, which doesn’t help how trapped Mary feels.
Brockett returns and visits to find Stephen with Mary and no Puddle. He realizes, rapidly, that Mary is bored and warns Stephen about it. As he is the one friend Stephen really listens to, she agrees to take Mary to one of Valérie’s parties. They meet a wide cast of characters at this party that become their friends.
There’s Pat who is implied to be a transgender woman, Jamie and Barbara a lesbian couple that parallel Stephen and Mary who ran away from their home because their families wouldn’t let them be together. So, now they are poor and in Paris. Wanda, an alcoholic and religious painter and then Adolphe Blanc a Jewish philosopher.
At this point, I kind of have to address Hall’s language when it comes to Blanc and two black men that appear a bit later. Blanc is talked about in an interesting way, to me at least. It feels like a genuine attempt to be progressive in describing a Jewish man, but I think there are limits to the language used to talk about these topics in the 1920s that makes it a bit of a weird read.
The same can be said about the two black men, Lincoln and Henry Jones. They are brothers who Jamie knows from her music school. She invites them to perform for all of her white friends. They sing plantation songs from the American South. Hall uses particular words to describe both of these men, but she clearly believed abolition was a good thing. It’s still a little awkward and I don’t know how I feel about how their plantation songs as the children of former slaves being relatable in some way to white queer people. It’s—a lot. I’m not the person who can speak on what these scenes could mean or accidentally mean to Jewish or black folks. I’ll just warn that these scenes exist and might feel strange. The best I can offer is that Hall, in most certainly a misinformed way, tried to give good representations.
So, they made friends, they visit those friends. Mary is happy to have friends, but Brockett warns Stephen again that she is stifling Mary. Which did confuse me a little. She did as Brockett suggested and Mary seemed much happier. When Brockett brings this up again, it seems like he’s seeing into the future because shortly after that conversation, Stephen and Mary take a vacation out in the country where they meet a wealthy older woman who dotes on them.
This leads to that woman learning through rumors that Stephen and Mary are known to be lesbians and cutting off all contact with them. This is the first time Mary deals with the homophobia of their time and is the snowball effect of a larger problem.
Right after the war, Stephen and Mary took a different vacation where Stephen refuses to tell Mary what danger they were putting themselves in by being together but does want her to know the dangers so she can make an informed choice. It’s a self-made misery. At the end of that vacation, Mary supposedly understands and they make up.
So, this instance with the older woman tells Stephen that Mary didn’t really understand. Which leads to Stephen hiding more and more from Mary. Her feelings, the fact that Stephen’s mother hates Mary without even knowing her, and Stephen, in general, believing that she knows best for Mary without consulting her.
Perhaps Brockett knew that this was coming, as Stephen’s actual good friend, he probably saw it coming, but there are few other points of view explored at this point in the book.
Eventually, Mary convinces Stephen to go with their friends out to bars in Paris’s night life, most of them gay bars. Stephen hates these outings, but Mary loves them and Stephen fears letting Mary go to them alone, so she keeps going and never tells Mary that she hates these outings.
While all of this is going on, Barbara gets very ill with pneumonia in both lungs. Both her and Jamie had resisted all forms of help from Mary and Stephen who are much better off. So, those two often invited Barbara and Jamie to meals so that they could eat. The entire time they knew these two, Barbara was sick with a terrible cough.
Finally, it becomes too much for her. Stephen calls for a doctor and the best that they can do is make Barbara comfortable in her last moments. Jamie becomes unresponsive and heartbroken. When Barbara finally passes, Jamie sadly asks Stephen and Mary to give her just the night to say goodbye. Despite Stephen’s misgivings, they leave.
In the morning, the door to their apartment has to be broken down and they find that Jamie committed suicide in the night. This moment haunts Mary and Stephen quiet deeply, Mary more vocally than Stephen.
After their deaths, their friend’s kind of disappear from the story and Brockett, Stephen’s last line to common sense, doesn’t appear at all. Only Valérie is left and Stephen visits her often to talk about her feelings instead of to Mary.
Valérie thinks Stephen is kind of stupid for doing that, but lets her make her bad decisions. Stephen goes so often that Mary starts to ask if they’re having an affair. Also at this time, Martin, the boy who asked Stephen to marry him ages ago, sends a letter. He’s in Paris getting his eye looked at because his optic nerve was struck by a stray bullet during the war and a doctor is saving his eye.
He expresses regret for how he acted back then and wants to reconnect, no romantic feelings involved. Stephen, craving that old friendship, invites him to dinner. Thus begins the downfall of Stephen.
Just like before, Martin stays around longer than he intends to spend as much time as he can with Mary and Stephen. Even David the dog, who liked Stephen, prefers Martin over her. Stephen feels herself fading away and then Martin, a genuinely good guy and knows that Mary and Stephen are lovers, struggles with his feelings for Mary.
He knows that if he doesn’t help them both, by probably marrying Mary, their relationship won’t last because Mary is too young and naïve for the cruelty of the world towards gay people. However, he doesn’t want to upset his good friend. Eventually he talks to Stephen about all of this and instead of dissuading Martin from pursuing Mary as he requests, she tells him to compete with her, sure that she will always win Mary’s affection.
It’s implied that she’s lying in that moment. That the only way she could give up her control is if it is won from her. Poor Mary, told nothing about any of this, is caught between her intense love for Stephen and her growing feelings for Martin.
Stephen begins to come to a realization. Earlier, when Mary and Stephen started to live together, Hall says this:
“But in such relationships as Mary’s and Stephen’s, Nature must pay for experimenting; she may even have to pay very dearly—it largely depends on the sexual mixture. A drop too little of the male in the love, and mighty indeed will be the wastage. And yet there are cases—and Stephen’s was one—in which the male will emerge triumphant; in which passion combined with real devotion will become a spur rather than a deterrent; in which love and endeavor will fight side by side in a desperate struggle to find some solution.” (Page 288)
In other words, a queer relationship can only work unless one of the partners is more masculine than the other or—in other words—mimics a heterosexual relationship. Now that Mary is torn between Martin and Stephen, Stephen is realizing that she is not truly enough.
Three times, two men have told her that. Brockett, a gay man, said it twice trying to be genuinely helpful. Martin also tells her she’s not enough for Mary. Stephen thinks back to Angela Crossby telling Stephen that they could never marry and Stephen could never properly provide for her.
She’s falling victim to this belief that was held at the time that queer relationships could never be fulfilling and brings this up to Valérie. In a very reasonable response, Valérie tells Stephen to just talk to Mary and let her decide, but Stephen is stubborn and no longer has Puddle or Brockett to talk reason into her. She asks Valérie to pretend that they’re having an affair. Valérie calls her stupid but lets her make her bad decisions.
Stephen tells Martin to wait in a certain spot then tells Mary that she is having an affair with Valérie. This leads Mary to run out of the house in tears, right into Martin (who is 39, by the way—4 years older than Stephen and like, 11 years older than Mary if my math is right). Martin takes Mary away and then—I’m not sure what happens.
This all happens pretty much in the last chapter of the book. The last two pages contain this very abstract scene where Stephen falls to despair. She is accosted by the voices of dead queer folks who accuse her of giving up and not doing better to hold onto Mary. She cries out to God, begging Him to tell her why he has forsaken queer people whom she believes weren’t mistakes or evil for existing, but has been abandoned by God, much like Cain.
And then it ends.
That’s it. We don’t know what happens to Mary and Martin, although it’s easy to assume. I don’t know if Stephen dies in this moment or is just really depressed. I was a bit—alright. I knew it was going to end badly, but that was something else entirely. I thought they would die just like Barbara and Jamie or similarly. Instead—there’s a convoluted cheating plot and then a pretty valid crash out by Stephen.
I don’t know how to feel about this ending. For Stephen who never seemed to care too much for other people, shown from a young age to have social anxiety and then as an adult the friends she did have had to muscle their way into her life, the idea that all of the dead queer folks would blame her for anything seems a bit out of place. She never placed the burden of being queer on herself in a meaningful way.
Sure, she said it a lot. Sure, she forced Mary to know about it, but again, Stephen pretty much avoided people and never attempted to change her queerness. She would rant to Valérie about how unfair it all was but had no intention of acting on it. Valérie once stated that Stephen could do a lot of good for the queer community. She doesn’t elaborate on how and Stephen doesn’t seem to understand what she means either.
I do understand trying to demand answers from God. She had done that many times as a child. As an adult, there’s a short section where she attends church with Wendi and thinks about God again and why he has done this to her. Thanks to Adolphe Blanc, she comes to see queer folks as not a mistake or an abomination against God’s will but a part of God’s plan for humanity. That it is society that makes them poor creatures.
On the other side of this ending—I don’t understand Mary’s motivation either. To start, we start to lose other points of view near the end, trapped in Stephen’s downward spiral which I think was on purpose. However, having been in Mary’s head for at least a little bit, it doesn’t make sense that she would have feelings for Martin all of a sudden.
I think the intent that perhaps would be more identifiable in a different time and place, is that concept of Stephen not being enough once again. Brockett had warned that Mary would grow to resent Stephen eventually if she didn’t do a better job being a provider, essentially. While Mary wasn’t conscious of her resentment, I think the fact that she was suspicious that Stephen was cheating, the fact Stephen followed the footsteps of her father and Puddle and withheld information, mourning Jamie and Barbara, rejection from some people they attempted to befriend, and in general feeling trapped at the house all came to a head when Martin was around.
Martin would talk about his home in Canada, where Mary could have the life of luxury, but also plenty of things to do. He, in the end, was born a man. He had enough masculinity, to the book’s belief, to care for Mary entirely. While Mary loved Stephen more than anything, resentment can break up the strongest of adoration and love.
I think my problem with that concept is my modern lens. When I remove that, it feels a lot more reasonable, but with it, I feel like Stephen was doomed to fail by the narrative. She did everything she could. She made money through her books, she went out with Mary all of the time. She warned her some people might not be very happy to know that they were lovers. She did everything right and it would never be enough—which is the point. The point just feels like it was purposefully thrown over my head because Mary was happy with what they had. It was Stephen and Martin and Brockett, the masculine people in her life, that decided for Mary that Stephen wasn’t enough.
Valérie was right. Stephne should have let Mary speak for herself. Let her decide if Stephen was enough for her. The only thing that chased Mary away in the end was Stephen admitting to cheating with Valérie. It wasn’t resentment of not being provided for. It wasn’t her feelings for Martin. It was grief that she was cheated on by someone she loved so much.
It’s supposed to be tragic, I know that. For a long time, this sort of ending was extremely relatable because it was the reality of a lot of queer folks. For me, I know it didn’t have to end this way with everyone’s personality and beliefs getting in their way. For them, that was how it was ‘supposed’ to be. Queer people just, weren’t enough. There was something wrong with them. Thankfully, that ‘wrong’ thing is hinted to be societal, but it also appears to be personal as well.
I don’t know. I was stunned and said, out loud, “No way, that can’t be it!” the entire time I was reading the ending. Which confused my poor wife who was sitting next to me. She’s still kind of confused because I couldn’t articulate what was wrong in the moment. I still don’t know how I feel about it.
I did like reading this book. It had wonderfully goofy moments and some very serious heartbreaking ones. It was long. It’s 377 pages and it feels it. Chapters were short and felt like they flew by which was nice but also meant you didn’t really move that far in the story.
I really liked the characters, even if they made stupid decisions, mostly because they did. It made them feel real and made them interesting. I liked that I could tell Anna regretted her choices, but still stuck to her beliefs and remained forever between a rock and a hard place with Stephen. I liked that Brockett seemed to bounce around his interests but being honest and blunt with Stephen and was just about the only character to do so.
I liked that Stephen had anger issues she learned to control, that she had many hobbies and loved very deeply. She was a great character primed to make bad decisions.
I will say that the writing is of its time. It’s a little hard to follow sometimes and takes adjusting. Spelling is also interesting. I don’t know if it’s just this reprint, but some words are spelt interestingly. For example, in a number of instances, ‘are’ is spelled ‘arc’ and I’m not sure if that’s on purpose. I don’t know enough about 1920s British literature to know.
There are typos. Spots with too many spaces between words, sometimes those spaces indicate that a whole word is missing from the sentence, usually it’s relatively easy to guess what’s missing.
Regardless, it was a very cool and interesting read. I recommend giving it a read if you can find a copy, even if you’ve read this entire review. I left stuff out, of course. If you do wish to find a copy, my sister found this one on the Half-Priced Books website. Just be careful when searching for it.
I know this was a long one, but I just had so many feelings about this book. If you’ve made it to the end, I deeply appreciate it.
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