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At Bow Street Magistrates Court on 16 November 1928, Sir Chartres Biron ordered the destruction of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for lesbianism. It is tempting to think that Hall got into trouble simply for raising the issue of lesbianism, since female "sexual inversion" (as it was then known) was not legally recognized in early twentieth-century Britain. A proposal to extend to women the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which outlawed "acts of gross indecency" between men, ran aground in the House of Commons in 1921 because, Samuel Hynes speculates, "men found it [lesbianism] too gross to deal with" (375). However, at least two other novels published in the autumn of 1928, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women and, more important, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, clearly broached the same subject, yet escaped official censure. In Hall's case the aggravating factor seems to have been not the subject but the treatment. Whereas Woolf's fictional biography, like Mackenzie's satire, sets out to make readers laugh, The Well of Loneliness pleads the cause of sexual inversion by taking up an aggressively polemical stance.
A summary of Judge Biron's ruling in The Times (17 November) suggests that Hall provoked the British authorities into legal action by preaching an unacceptable sexual doctrine in an earnest tone that sought to deny the possibility of either laughter or moral censure. Conceding that Well "had some literary merit," and that such a book "might even have a strong moral influence," Biron declared:
But in the present case there was not one word that suggested that anyone with the horrible tendencies described was in the least degree blameworthy. All the characters were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration. What was even more serious was that certain acts were described in the most alluring terms.
In order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure that her lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, appeared above reproach. Ironically, as Hall's biographer Michael Baker has noted, it was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure (220). If those virtues had been nonexistent, or at least laughable, as in Extraordinary Women, The Well of Loneliness would have passed muster as having, if not a "strong" moral influence, at least...