The Well of Loneliness
Date: 1929
Region: North America, Europe
Subject: Sexual/Gender Orientation
Medium: Literature
Artist: Radclyffe Hall
Confronting Bodies: New York Court
Dates of Action: 1929
Location: New York City, New York, England
Description of Artwork: The Well of Loneliness, a mawkish yet powerfully moving novel about a lesbian's struggle for acceptance and self-respect.
The Incident: The book was found obscene in Britain even though it had no explicit descriptions of sex. Expert testimony on its literary worth, offered in the English trial by Virginia Woolf and other major writers of the day, was rejected by the court as irrelevant. A New York Court in 1929, ruled The Well of Loneliness obscene even though the judge acknowledged that the book was "a well written, carefully constructed piece of fiction" with "no unclean words." It was penalized because it drew a sympathetic portrait of homosexuality, and "pleads for tolerance on the part of society."
Results of Incident: The prosecutor in the case used the Hicklin Rule to demonstrate that some passages were obscene and therefore under the Hicklin Rule the entire work was obscene. The Hicklin Rule was overturned in 1934 in the case United States vs. One Book Entitled Ulysses.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Censorship,J.Green, Facts on File pg.. 3-4