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.

[14] 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".

[57] 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.

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.

[65] 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.

[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".

[86] 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.

[91] 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"[92] prevalent in the nineteenth century.

'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.

'"[106] 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.

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.

[115] 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[e] itself from the leprosy of these lepers".

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.

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.

[124] Dawson also printed a scathing condemnation of the Home Office by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw and started a counter-campaign that helped Hall obtain statements of support from the National Union of Railwaymen and the South Wales Miners' Federation.

[125]Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster drafted a letter of protest against the suppression of The Well, assembling a list of supporters that included Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Arnold Bennett, Vera Brittain and Ethel Smyth.

[127] The Well's sentimental romanticism, traditional form, and lofty style – using words like withal, betoken and hath – did not appeal to Modernist aesthetics; not all those willing to defend it on grounds of literary freedom were equally willing to praise its artistry.

The topic in itself was not necessarily unacceptable; a book that depicted the "moral and physical degradation which indulgence in those vices must necessary involve" might be allowed, but no reasonable person could say that a plea for the recognition and toleration of inverts was not obscene.

In a "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, Janet Flanner reported that it sold most heavily at the news vendor's cart that served passengers travelling to London on La Fleche D'Or.

He took out a $10,000 bank loan to outbid another publisher which had offered a $7,500 advance, and enlisted Morris Ernst, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, to defend the book against legal challenges.

[149] In the US, as in the UK, the Hicklin test of obscenity applied, but New York case law had established that books should be judged by their effects on adults rather than on children and that literary merit was relevant.

[149] In an opinion issued on 19 February 1929, Magistrate Hyman Bushel declined to take the book's literary qualities into account and said The Well was "calculated to deprave and corrupt minds open to its immoral influences".

[160] Ladies Almanack is a roman à clef of a lesbian literary and artistic circle in Paris, written in an archaic, Rabelaisian style and starring Natalie Barney as Dame Evangeline Musset.

When, unlike Sir Phillip, he confronts his daughter, she replies confidently: "Thou, good Governor, wast expecting a Son when you lay atop of your Choosing ... Am I not doing after your very Desire, and is it not the more commendable, seeing that I do it without the Tools for the Trade, and yet nothing complain?

Then she changed into a white dress for a final speech in which she "begged humanity, 'already used to earthquakes and murderers', to try to put up with a minor calamity like the play's and the book's Lesbian protagonist, Stephen Gordon".

[166] A 1951 French film set in a girls' boarding school was released in the United States as The Pit of Loneliness to capitalise on the notoriety of The Well,[167] but was actually adapted from the novel Olivia,[168] now known to have been written by Dorothy Bussy.

Little of Hall's novel can be discerned in its story of a butch lesbian who is blinded with acid and run over by a truck, freeing the naïve young roommate she seduced to find love with a fullback.

A critic for the Motion Picture Herald reported that during the film's run in Los Angeles in 1937 – as a double feature with Love Life of a Gorilla – a self-identified "doctor" appeared after the screening to sell pamphlets purporting to explain homosexuality.