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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Radclyffe Hall's 'The Well of Loneliness' is a groundbreaking novel that explores the themes of love, identity, and societal judgement in the LGBTQ+ community. Through the protagonist, Stephen Gordon, Hall delves into the complexities of gender and sexual orientation in a time when such topics were considered taboo. The book is written in a lyrical and introspective style, drawing the reader into Stephen's inner turmoil and struggles for acceptance. Hall's use of rich descriptions and emotional depth sets this novel apart in the literary landscape of the early 20th century. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a poignant and thought-provoking work that challenges traditional norms and offers a voice to those marginalized in society. Radclyffe Hall, herself a lesbian and a prominent figure in LGBTQ+ history, drew from her own experiences and observations to create a narrative that resonates with readers to this day. Her boldness in tackling difficult subjects with sensitivity and grace showcases her unique perspective and commitment to advocating for social change. I highly recommend 'The Well of Loneliness' to readers who appreciate literature that pushes boundaries and inspires compassion and understanding for all individuals. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Well of Loneliness
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Table of Contents
Introduction
A self insists on its truth against the full weight of social denial. The Well of Loneliness frames this struggle with grave clarity, tracing the cost of authenticity when custom, law, and language seem aligned against it. Its drama is not spectacle but conscience: what happens when a life that wants to love is told it must not, cannot, should not. That tension animates every page, turning private feeling into public question. The conflict is as much about recognition as romance, about citizenship as much as sentiment, and about the hard, steady work of claiming space where none has been granted.
Written by the English novelist Radclyffe Hall and first published in 1928, the novel emerged from a late-1920s landscape marked by both social conservatism and new scientific discussion of sexuality. Hall composed a book that sought moral seriousness rather than titillation, addressing subject matter rarely treated with dignity in mainstream fiction. Its timing mattered: postwar societies were reassessing gender roles and personal freedom, yet traditional norms retained strong power. The result is a work simultaneously of its moment and at odds with it, pursuing an argument for human worth through the medium of a carefully wrought, conventional narrative form.
At its center stands Stephen Gordon, born into an established English household, aware from early life of a difference that language around her cannot easily accommodate. Hall charts Stephen’s coming to consciousness with painstaking sympathy, following her discovery of desire, her attempts to live honorably, and her search for belonging. The premise is simple and radical: a woman who loves women seeks the right to exist openly and to contribute fully, without apology. By grounding the story in family rooms, schools, and social occasions, the novel shows how institutions shape intimate life, and how integrity may demand resistance.
Hall’s artistic strategy is notable for its restraint. She writes in a realist tradition tempered by psychological insight, giving Stephen a rich inner life and measuring feeling against social consequence. The prose favors clarity over flourish, yet the book is alive with symbolic resonance, notably images that suggest depth, solitude, and prayerful appeal. The narrative voice is steady and compassionate, refusing both melodramatic sensationalism and clinical detachment. This stylistic poise allows the work’s ethical claims to gather force gradually, through scenes of ordinary encounter and quiet revelation rather than rhetorical thunder alone.
The novel’s publication quickly became a cultural event because it treated lesbian love as real, serious, and deserving of respect. In Britain, it provoked an obscenity prosecution that resulted in suppression there, igniting a broad debate about literature, morality, and the rights of authors and readers. In the United States, the book faced legal challenges yet ultimately circulated, fueling discussion across newspapers, salons, and courts. The controversy, while painful for those involved, made the book an emblem of artistic freedom and social candor, and etched it into the public consciousness far beyond typical literary circles.
The Well of Loneliness holds classic status for several intertwined reasons. It is one of the earliest mainstream English-language novels to portray lesbian love sympathetically, insisting on the full humanity of its protagonist. It also exemplifies how fiction can expand the space of what is sayable, making literature a vehicle for civil argument. Its influence is amplified by the seriousness of its tone: Hall’s refusal to sensationalize lends the book enduring authority. Readers have returned to it not only for its historical importance but for its sustained thematic exploration of dignity, companionship, and the claim to live without shame.
The book’s impact radiated through subsequent generations of writers and readers who found in it a precedent for candor and complexity. By proving that a large audience would engage with such a narrative, it helped clear publishing pathways for later works exploring queer lives in varied registers. Its example encouraged authors to treat sexuality not as subplot or pathology but as a central axis of character and society. Beyond literature, the novel contributed to broader conversations about law, medicine, and education, showing how cultural artifacts can act as catalysts for institutional self-scrutiny.
Part of the novel’s endurance lies in its layered treatment of loneliness. Solitude here is both imposed and chosen, a refuge and a burden. Hall traces the ache of misrecognition, the relief of finding kinship, and the difficult trade-offs that accompany visibility. She engages the period’s vocabulary of identity—terms that can feel dated today—while aiming to convert stigma into understanding. The book values courage without romanticizing suffering, acknowledging the costs exacted by exclusion. In doing so, it locates hope not in easy victories but in the stubborn, sustained practice of living truthfully among others.
Stephen is rendered not as a symbol but as a person whose gifts, flaws, affections, and ambitions shape her path. Around her, Hall stages a range of responses—acceptance, confusion, prejudice, solidarity—offered by family, friends, and acquaintances. These interactions map the social terrain, from courteous salons to more constrained domestic spaces, revealing how class and convention mediate intimacy. The result is a study in character as social ethics: choices matter, words matter, and love must navigate not only feeling but also the rules that attempt to govern it.
Formally, the book advances by steady accumulation rather than abrupt turns. Hall’s chapters interweave personal narrative with social observation, giving readers time to inhabit Stephen’s perspective and to see the world that judges her. Description serves purpose: landscapes reflect interior weather, and recurring motifs trace the deep pull of conscience and belonging. The tone is grave yet inviting, asking readers to weigh their sympathies and their assumptions. This measured architecture helps the novel sustain its argument without didacticism, allowing the force of its human portrait to carry its plea for recognition.
To read The Well of Loneliness today is to encounter both a historical document and a living work of art. Some terminology reflects its era, yet the novel’s moral intelligence and emotional clarity remain striking. Readers attuned to contemporary conversations about identity, representation, and social justice will recognize the contours of debates that continue. The book invites patience and empathy, asking us to imagine how structures of respect and care might be built. It rewards careful attention with a fuller sense of how private integrity can become a public ethic, and how literature can dignify lives too often caricatured.
Its lasting appeal arises from a union of courage and craft. By giving narrative form to the demand for recognition, Radclyffe Hall created a work that helped shift cultural horizons while offering a compelling story of a single life. The questions it raises—about fairness, belonging, and the possibility of living openly—remain urgent. In an age still negotiating the terms of visibility and rights, this novel speaks with undimmed relevance. It stands as a classic because it changed conversations and continues to change readers, reminding us that empathy is not a sentiment alone but a practice sustained over time.
Synopsis
The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928 by Radclyffe Hall, traces the life of Stephen Gordon, an English woman whose difference from social norms is evident from childhood. Set across late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain and continental Europe, the novel follows Stephen’s search for belonging as she confronts rigid expectations about gender and love. Noted for its candid treatment of same-sex desire—described in the period’s language of inversion—the book interweaves personal formation with social critique. Beginning at the family estate of Morton, the narrative proceeds chronologically, emphasizing interior struggle, social pressure, and the making of a self. Its reception was contentious, provoking censorship in Britain.
Stephen’s early years at Morton establish her sense of apartness within a privileged household. The daughter of Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon, she is drawn to pursuits typically reserved for boys—riding, fencing, and scholarly study—and recoils from the ornamental expectations placed on girls of her class. A deep rapport with her father nurtures her confidence, while her mother’s discomfort foreshadows future conflict. The countryside, animals, and solitude become refuges where Stephen can be competent and at ease. Yet everyday incidents—dress, manners, visiting rituals—repeatedly mark her as different. These formative contrasts introduce the book’s central question: how can an individual live truthfully when social forms deny their nature?
Adolescence intensifies Stephen’s isolation and brings her first stirrings of romantic feeling. An attachment within the household alarms her family and underscores how little room exists for her desires. Her mother’s reaction is to enforce distance and propriety, deepening the sense of exile at home. Stephen turns to study and reflection, encountering contemporary writings that classify people like her as inverts—a vocabulary that gives explanation but also carries stigma. Determined to claim seriousness and purpose, she seeks arenas where talent, discipline, and courage count more than appearances. The resulting self-education prepares the way for adult choices while widening the gap between inner certainty and outward compliance.
Stephen’s first adult love arrives through Angela Crossby, a sophisticated, married neighbor whose attentions awaken hope as well as peril. The relationship, conducted in a world attuned to scandal, exposes the vulnerability of loving across conventional boundaries. Gossip, fear, and unequal commitments make privacy fragile, and Stephen experiences both exaltation and disillusionment. The episode clarifies the risks of candor and the costs of concealment, pushing her toward independence beyond the family estate. It also refines her understanding of desire as honorable and enduring, even when society brands it deviant. This painful apprenticeship in love marks a turning point from sheltered youth to self-directed adulthood.
After the early disappointments and estrangement at home, Stephen seeks a vocation that can sustain dignity. Writing offers discipline, recognition, and a measure of financial autonomy, allowing her to leave Morton and move within broader artistic circles. Professional achievement does not erase loneliness, but it affirms competence and agency, countering a culture that insists she has no rightful place. Friendships with sympathetic men and women provide intermittent support, even as family tensions persist. The balance of work and private life becomes a quiet experiment in living: can talent and service earn a tolerance that personal life alone is denied, or must authenticity remain hidden?
World War I alters the field of possibility. Stephen volunteers for service and joins a women’s ambulance unit in France, where danger and hardship make courage the common currency. In this setting she meets Mary Llewellyn, a younger driver whose steadiness under pressure and openness of spirit bridge the isolation Stephen has long known. The demands of wartime work flatten social hierarchies and offer a temporary suspension of peacetime judgment. Shared labor, risk, and mutual respect deepen their bond, which grows from camaraderie into committed attachment. The war sequences highlight competence and sacrifice, underscoring the novel’s claim that love and service are intertwined.
With the armistice, Stephen and Mary attempt to build a life together outside England’s most constricting circles. Paris provides relative anonymity and access to a cosmopolitan network, including households where people like them can gather without constant disguise. Figures such as the worldly Valerie Seymour model a discreet yet humane ethos, offering advice and refuge while reminding them of the compromises such safety entails. The couple’s home strives for ordinary domesticity—work, meals, shared routines—yet is shadowed by social vulnerability. Invitations arrive selectively; livelihoods depend on discretion; small slights accumulate. The city’s partial toleration sharpens, rather than resolves, the dilemma of visibility and belonging.
As years pass, external pressure and internal scruple converge. Stephen is increasingly troubled by the narrow prospects society assigns to Mary and by the fear that their love, though steadfast, may condemn her partner to perpetual marginality. Encounters with intolerance, and moments of kindness tinged with pity, intensify Stephen’s sense of responsibility. She considers what protection, honor, or future she can secure within the existing order, and what sacrifices that might require. The novel carefully registers the weight of these choices without sensational gesture, presenting a conflict between self-preservation and care for another that tests the limits of endurance, loyalty, and hope.
Throughout, The Well of Loneliness argues—through narrative rather than manifesto—that lives like Stephen’s are neither pathological nor trivial, but fully human and deserving of social recognition. The book’s clinical vocabulary reflects its time, yet its moral appeal rests on observed character, work, and love. Its controversial reception—censorship in Britain and vigorous public debate—testifies to the cultural fault lines it exposed. Without disclosing the closing turns, the novel’s enduring significance lies in its sober insistence that dignity requires both private authenticity and public space. It remains a touchstone of LGBTQ+ literature, valued for articulating the costs of exclusion and the necessity of compassion.
Historical Context
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness is set chiefly in late Victorian and Edwardian England and traces into the 1910s and 1920s, years marked by the prestige of the landed gentry, the authority of the Church of England, and the customs of a rigid class hierarchy. Britain’s imperial reach remained a backdrop to elite life, while domestic institutions such as public schools, the officer corps, and country estates shaped ideals of character and duty. Hall situates her narrative within these dominant frameworks, showing how respectability, lineage, and religious morality define belonging. The book’s emphasis on social acceptance and exclusion reflects the powerful gatekeeping functions these institutions exercised in everyday life.
The period’s gender order rested on the doctrine of separate spheres, assigning women to domesticity and men to public life. Professional pathways for women expanded slowly through the late nineteenth century, but marriage and motherhood remained normative expectations among the upper and middle classes. By the 1910s, debates about the ‘New Woman’ pressed against these boundaries, yet practicality and prejudice sharply constrained gender-nonconforming lives. Hall’s protagonist embodies a challenge to conventional femininity, dramatizing the cost of deviation from prescribed roles. The novel thereby dialogues with contemporaneous anxieties about dress, deportment, and vocation, foregrounding how gender nonconformity attracted social sanction even without explicit criminal statutes.
The scientific language framing the book draws on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexology. European and British writers such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis advanced theories of sexual inversion, positing an innate, congenital disposition rather than moral failing. In Britain, Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, including Sexual Inversion, circulated arguments that same-sex desire was a natural variant, though often couched in medicalized terms. Hall adopted the vocabulary of inversion to claim dignity and recognition for those so described. This strategy sought legitimacy through prevailing scientific discourse, even as it risked pathologizing the very identities it defended.
The British legal setting made same-sex desire among men perilous. The Labouchere Amendment of 1885 criminalized gross indecency between males, leading to prominent prosecutions into the early twentieth century. Women were not explicitly targeted in statute, but a 1921 attempt in Parliament to criminalize sexual acts between women was rejected, partly out of concern that legislation would publicize such conduct. Despite the absence of formal prohibition, social penalties for gender-nonconforming women remained severe, affecting employment, family standing, and social participation. Hall’s novel reflects this paradox: formal invisibility did not equal safety, and stigma could be as coercive as law.
The First World War profoundly shifted gendered labor. Between 1914 and 1918, British women served in nursing units, munitions factories, transport services, and auxiliary corps. Motor ambulances, field hospitals, and relief organizations opened new spaces for women to drive, administer, and manage under crisis conditions. After 1918, many of these opportunities contracted, yet war experience had altered expectations. Hall reflects these transitions by placing her protagonist in wartime service, evoking units such as voluntary aid detachments and women’s ambulance groups operating in France and Britain. The war thus functions as both an emancipation and a crucible, granting purpose while deepening later frustrations with peacetime conformity.
Technological and cultural modernization accelerated social contact. Automobiles, telephones, and affordable print culture expanded mobility and information flows. Cinemas and cabarets grew with urban nightlife, while newspapers amplified moral campaigns and scandals. In the 1920s, bobbed hair, tailored suits, and nightlife visibility signaled new gender codes, even as they provoked backlash. Paris, especially the Left Bank, offered expatriate circles where women who loved women socialized more openly, connected to salons and artistic communities. Hall’s narrative evokes these transnational spaces, contrasting them with English provincial scrutiny. This juxtaposition underscores how geography could mediate the possibilities for intimacy, community, and survival.
Class structures remain central. Country estates signified lineage and stewardship, but postwar Britain confronted agricultural depression, new taxation, and declining domestic service. Death duties and changing markets pressed landowning families, reshaping social relations below stairs and above. Hall portrays estate life as both privilege and constraint, where lineage confers duty yet polices individuality. The shift from rural estates to urban or continental refuges mirrors larger patterns of migration among those seeking anonymity or liberty. By mapping a passage from ancestral grounds to cosmopolitan settings, the novel charts a broader social transition in which class markers no longer fully shielded unconventional lives.
Religious authority permeated British public morality. The Church of England, along with Nonconformist and Catholic voices, influenced debates on sexuality, censorship, and national character. Sermons, moral societies, and religious periodicals framed sexual variance as vice or temptation, urging vigilance over literature and art. Hall’s appeal in the novel uses Christian ethical language to argue for compassion and recognition, positioning the work not as titillation but as testimony. The clash between pastoral care and moral condemnation in the public sphere mirrors the novel’s tension: can a society claiming Christian charity reconcile itself to the existence of those it refuses to name as equal?
Britain’s censorship regime, rooted in the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and interpreted through the Hicklin test of 1868, empowered magistrates to suppress works deemed to corrupt those most susceptible. Under Hicklin, isolated passages and potential influence on vulnerable readers could suffice for condemnation. By the 1920s, these standards still governed literary prosecutions, producing uneven outcomes and considerable chilling effects. Hall’s novel, which avoids explicit sexual description, nonetheless faced scrutiny for presenting same-sex love sympathetically. The case became a test of whether a serious, sober narrative advocating social tolerance could be branded obscene for its central subject matter alone.
The Well of Loneliness appeared in 1928 with Jonathan Cape in London. Early reviews included strong denunciations, notably from James Douglas of the Sunday press, who urged suppression on moral grounds. The Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, signaled the government’s willingness to act if the publisher persisted. Cape attempted to navigate the threat, including exploring publication arrangements abroad, but British authorities moved to seize copies. The press campaign amplified anxiety about public decency, framing the book as a social danger rather than a literary intervention. Thus the novel’s fate quickly exceeded the realm of criticism and entered the machinery of state censorship.
Proceedings were brought at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in late 1928. Relying on the prevailing obscenity standard, the chief magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ruled the book obscene and ordered that copies be suppressed and destroyed within the jurisdiction. The decision emphasized the supposed moral harm of sympathetic portrayal rather than any explicit content. This outcome reflected how the law could penalize representation itself when it challenged normative sexual morality. The trial also demonstrated the power of administrative and summary procedures, where expert testimony and literary merit arguments struggled to overcome the broad remit of the Hicklin test.
In the United States, the novel faced action by moral watchdogs shortly after its release, particularly in New York, where the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice led campaigns against allegedly indecent works. The American publisher Covici-Friede issued the book, and legal proceedings followed under state obscenity law. In 1929, New York courts allowed the book’s circulation, concluding it was not obscene. This contrast with Britain highlighted differences in standards and judicial approaches on either side of the Atlantic. The American clearance helped the novel reach a wide readership, shaping discourse about sexual identity and censorship in the interwar period.
The novel’s transnational horizons resonate with European debates. In Paris, women writers and artists cultivated circles where same-sex relationships were more openly acknowledged, while in Weimar Germany, the sex reform movement led by figures such as Magnus Hirschfeld advocated decriminalization and scientific understanding. Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, founded in 1919, symbolized these efforts until its destruction by Nazis in 1933. Although Hall wrote in an English context, her deployment of a medical vocabulary and depiction of Parisian refuge align with broader continental currents that sought to name, study, and legitimize sexual minorities against entrenched moral and legal hostility.
Radclyffe Hall herself was an established author by 1928. Her earlier novel Adam’s Breed (1926) won major prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, giving her standing in British letters. Hall’s public self-presentation in masculine dress and her long partnership with the sculptor and translator Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, were known in literary circles. These biographical facts shaped public reception: critics and defenders alike read the novel through the lens of authorial identity. Hall’s seriousness of purpose, underscored by a medically inflected preface in some editions, aimed to insulate the work from charges of sensationalism.
Political change was also reshaping women’s citizenship. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised some women in Britain, and the Equal Franchise Act 1928 extended the vote on the same terms as men. The Well of Loneliness appeared in this year of formal electoral equality, yet equal suffrage did not entail sexual or social equality for gender-nonconforming women. The juxtaposition is telling: a polity willing to recognize women as voters remained unwilling to acknowledge lesbian existence without moral panic. Hall’s narrative, centered on dignity and social participation, tests the limits of newly proclaimed equality by exposing exclusions that persisted beneath constitutional reform.
Postwar anxieties about national efficiency and population further intensified scrutiny of sexuality. Eugenic thinking, respectability politics, and concerns about birth rates shaped public policy debates in Britain and elsewhere. Medical and moral authorities often depicted homosexuality as maladaptive or degenerative, categories that could justify coercive remedies or social ostracism. Hall appropriated aspects of the medical discourse—arguing for congenital inversion—to claim that moral condemnation was misplaced. Yet this move also reveals the constraints of the time: to make space within a hostile culture, one had to speak the language of heredity and hygiene. The novel’s plea emerges within this contested intellectual terrain.
Although banned in Britain after the 1928 decision, the book remained available abroad and in the United States, circulating through imports and later reissue. Only after the Second World War did British publication resume without successful prosecution; by mid-century, shifting standards and a changing cultural climate allowed domestic readers legal access. The long arc of the novel’s censorship history shows how obscenity law could delay but not erase a work’s influence. As debates about homosexuality moved from crime to psychology and eventually to rights, The Well of Loneliness persisted as a reference point in arguments about representation, harm, and social value.
Author Biography
Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943) was an English novelist and poet whose work bridged late Victorian sensibilities and the turbulent interwar period. She is best known for The Well of Loneliness, a landmark of queer literature that placed questions of sexuality, identity, and social justice at the center of public debate. Hall wrote in a clear, realist mode, often inflected with spiritual and ethical inquiry. Her career spanned poetry, short fiction, and novels, and her reputation rests on both literary achievement and the legal and moral controversies her work provoked. Today, she is regarded as a pivotal figure in twentieth-century discussions of censorship and representation.
Hall’s formative years combined conventional instruction with extensive self-education through reading and travel. She was exposed to European cultures and languages, an experience that shaped her cosmopolitan outlook and sensitivity to social difference. Publicly documented influences include the late Victorian and Edwardian realist tradition and the fin-de-siècle mood, alongside emergent sexological discourse. The writing and research of Havelock Ellis, in particular, provided terms and frameworks that Hall’s fiction would later interrogate and humanize. Though not aligned with high modernist experimentation, she wrote within the broader modern context, adopting a sober, classical style to address contemporary moral and psychological concerns.
Hall began publishing as a poet before gaining recognition as a novelist. Her early volumes, issued in the first decades of the twentieth century, established a voice attentive to landscape, emotion, and ethical struggle. Collections such as Twixt Earth and Stars and A Sheaf of Verses reveal a writer refining cadence and tone while testing subjects she would later expand in prose—duty, loneliness, spiritual yearning, and social belonging. Critics at the time noted her seriousness and technical control, even when they found the poetry’s diction traditional. This apprenticeship in verse supplied Hall with a disciplined sense of structure and rhythm that carried into her fiction.
By the 1920s Hall had turned decisively to the novel, where she found a wider readership. The Unlit Lamp explored the constraints of social expectation and thwarted ambition, signaling her commitment to psychologically driven narratives. A Saturday Life showed a lighter, more ironic touch. With Adam’s Breed she achieved major success, telling the story of an alienated worker whose quest for meaning intersects with spiritual themes. The novel drew strong critical notice and won important literary recognition in Britain and France, consolidating her status as a significant novelist. Its ethical seriousness and accessible style placed Hall at the forefront of interwar fiction.
The Well of Loneliness (1928) remains Hall’s most consequential book. Centering on a woman who loves women, it drew on contemporary sexology to argue for social recognition and humane understanding. The novel’s sober tone and ethical appeal were underscored by a prefatory endorsement from Havelock Ellis. Its publication ignited a widely reported obscenity prosecution in Britain, resulting in a ban and the destruction of copies. In the United States, legal challenges followed, but the book ultimately circulated there. The episode made Hall a focal point in debates over censorship, morality, and minority representation, and the novel became a touchstone for generations of readers.
Hall continued to write through the 1930s, developing themes of spirituality, suffering, and redemption. The Master of the House and The Sixth Beatitude delved into moral vocation and everyday resilience, while short fiction—including the long story Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself—extended her exploration of gender, identity, and social marginality. Critical responses varied: admirers praised her earnest realism and ethical conviction; detractors objected to her didactic tone or to the subject matter itself. Hall remained resolute in her belief that literature could humanize contested identities and foster empathy, even as the controversies surrounding her most famous novel shaped her public reputation.
In her later years, Hall’s health declined, but she continued to revise and champion her work. She died in 1943, leaving a body of writing that connects Edwardian narrative clarity with interwar moral inquiry. The Well of Loneliness, once suppressed in Britain, returned to general circulation after mid-century and now stands as a central text in LGBTQ literary history and in studies of censorship. Hall’s broader oeuvre—poetry, novels, and stories—rewards attention for its seriousness of purpose and humane focus. Her legacy endures in ongoing conversations about representation, freedom of expression, and the ethical responsibilities of fiction.
The Well of Loneliness
Dedicated to
OUR THREE SELVES
COMMENTARY
I have read The Well of Loneliness with great interest because—apart from its fine qualities as a novel by a writer of accomplished art—it possesses a notable psychological and sociological significance. So far as I know, it is the first English novel which presents, in a completely faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of sexual life as it exists among us to-day. The relation of certain people—who while different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes of the highest character and the finest aptitudes—to the often hostile society in which they move, presents difficult and still unsolved problems. The poignant situations which thus arise are here set forth so vividly, and yet with such complete absence of offence, that we must place Radclyffe Hall’s book on a high level of distinction.
Havelock Ellis
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All the characters in this book are purely imaginary, and if the author in any instance has used names that may suggest a reference to living persons, she has done so inadvertently.
A motor ambulance unit of British women drivers did very fine service upon the Allied front in France during the later months of the war, but although the unit mentioned in this book, of which Stephen Gordon becomes a member, operates in much the same area, it has never had any existence save in the author’s imagination.
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 1
1
Not very far from Upton-on-Severn—between it, in fact, and the Malvern Hills—stands the country seat of the Gordons of Bramley; well-timbered, well-cottaged, well-fenced and well-watered, having, in this latter respect, a stream that forks in exactly the right position to feed two large lakes in the grounds.
The house itself is of Georgian red brick, with charming circular windows near the roof. It has dignity and pride without ostentation, self-assurance without arrogance, repose without inertia; and a gentle aloofness that, to those who know its spirit, but adds to its value as a home. It is indeed like certain lovely women who, now old, belong to a bygone generation—women who in youth were passionate but seemly; difficult to win but when won, all-fulfilling. They are passing away, but their homesteads remain, and such an homestead is Morton.
To Morton Hall came the Lady Anna Gordon as a bride of just over twenty. She was lovely as only an Irish woman can be, having that in her bearing that betokened quiet pride, having that in her eyes that betokened great longing, having that in her body that betokened happy promise—the archetype of the very perfect woman, whom creating God has found good. Sir Philip had met her away in County Clare—Anna Molloy, the slim virgin thing, all chastity, and his weariness had flown to her bosom as a spent bird will fly to its nest—as indeed such a bird had once flown to her, she told him, taking refuge from the perils of a storm.
Sir Philip was a tall man and exceedingly well-favoured, but his charm lay less in feature than in a certain wide expression, a tolerant expression that might almost be called noble, and in something sad yet gallant in his deep-set hazel eyes. His chin, which was firm, was very slightly cleft, his forehead intellectual, his hair tinged with auburn. His wide-nostrilled nose was indicative of temper, but his lips were well-modelled and sensitive and ardent—they revealed him as a dreamer and a lover.
Twenty-nine when they had married, he had sown no few wild oats, yet Anna’s true instinct made her trust him completely. Her guardian had disliked him, opposing the engagement, but in the end she had had her own way. And as things turned out her choice had been happy, for seldom had two people loved more than they did; they loved with an ardour undiminished by time; as they ripened, so their love ripened with them.
Sir Philip never knew how much he longed for a son until, some ten years after marriage, his wife conceived a child; then he knew that this thing meant complete fulfilment, the fulfilment for which they had both been waiting. When she told him, he could not find words for expression, and must just turn and weep on her shoulder. It never seemed to cross his mind for a moment that Anna might very well give him a daughter; he saw her only as a mother of sons, nor could her warnings disturb him. He christened the unborn infant Stephen, because he admired the pluck of that Saint. He was not a religious man by instinct, being perhaps too much of a student, but he read the Bible for its fine literature, and Stephen had gripped his imagination. Thus he often discussed the future of their child: ‘I think I shall put Stephen down for Harrow[1],’ or: ‘I’d rather like Stephen to finish off abroad, it widens one’s outlook on life.’
And listening to him, Anna also grew convinced; his certainty wore down her vague misgivings, and she saw herself playing with this little Stephen, in the nursery, in the garden, in the sweet-smelling meadows. ‘And himself the lovely young man,’ she would say, thinking of the soft Irish speech of her peasants: ‘And himself with the light of the stars in his eyes, and the courage of a lion in his heart!’
When the child stirred within her she would think it stirred strongly because of the gallant male creature she was hiding; then her spirit grew large with a mighty new courage, because a man-child would be born. She would sit with her needlework dropped on her knees, while her eyes turned away to the long line of hills that stretched beyond the Severn valley. From her favourite seat underneath an old cedar, she would see these Malvern Hills in their beauty, and their swelling slopes seemed to hold a new meaning. They were like pregnant women, full-bosomed, courageous, great green-girdled mothers of splendid sons! Thus through all those summer months, she sat and watched the hills, and Sir Philip would sit with her—they would sit hand in hand. And because she felt grateful she gave much to the poor, and Sir Philip went to church, which was seldom his custom, and the Vicar came to dinner, and just towards the end many matrons called to give good advice to Anna.
But: ‘Man proposes—God disposes,’ and so it happened that on Christmas Eve, Anna Gordon was delivered of a daughter; a narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby, that yelled and yelled for three hours without ceasing, as though outraged to find itself ejected into life.
2
Anna Gordon held her child to her breast, but she grieved while it drank, because of her man who had longed so much for a son. And seeing her grief, Sir Philip hid his chagrin, and he fondled the baby and examined its fingers.
‘What a hand!’ he would say. ‘Why it’s actually got nails on all its ten fingers: little, perfect, pink nails!’
Then Anna would dry her eyes and caress it, kissing the tiny hand.
He insisted on calling the infant Stephen, nay more, he would have it baptized by that name. ‘We’ve called her Stephen so long,’ he told Anna, ‘that I really can’t see why we shouldn’t go on—’
Anna felt doubtful, but; Sir Philip was stubborn, as he could be at times over whims.
The Vicar said that it was rather unusual, so to mollify him they must add female names. The child was baptized in the village church as Stephen Mary Olivia Gertrude—and she throve, seeming strong, and when her hair grew it was seen to be auburn like Sir Philip’s. There was also a tiny cleft in her chin, so small just at first that it looked like a shadow; and after a while when her eyes lost the blueness that is proper to puppies and other young things, Anna saw that her eyes were going to be hazel—and thought that their expression was her father’s. On the whole she was quite a well-behaved baby, owing, no doubt, to a fine constitution. Beyond that first energetic protest at birth she had done very little howling.
It was happy to have a baby at Morton, and the old house seemed to become more mellow as the child, growing fast now and learning to walk, staggered or stumbled or sprawled on the floors that had long known the ways of children. Sir Philip would come home all muddy from hunting and would rush into the nursery before pulling off his boots, then down he would go on his hands and knees while Stephen clambered on to his back. Sir Philip would pretend to be well corned up, bucking and jumping and kicking wildly, so that Stephen must cling to his hair or his collar, and thump him with hard little arrogant fists. Anna, attracted by the outlandish hubbub, would find them, and would point to the mud on the carpet.
She would say: ‘Now, Philip, now, Stephen, that’s enough! It’s time for your tea,’ as though both of them were children. Then Sir Philip would reach up and disentangle Stephen, after which he would kiss Stephen’s mother.
3
The son that they waited for seemed long a-coming; he had not arrived when Stephen was seven. Nor had Anna produced other female offspring. Thus Stephen remained cock of the roost. It is doubtful if any only child is to be envied, for the only child is bound to become introspective; having no one of its own ilk in whom to confide, it is apt to confide in itself. It cannot be said that at seven years old the mind is beset by serious problems, but nevertheless it is already groping, may already be subject to small fits of dejection, may already be struggling to get a grip on life—on the limited life of its surroundings. At seven there are miniature loves and hatreds, which, however, loom large and are extremely disconcerting. There may even be present a dim sense of frustration, and Stephen was often conscious of this sense, though she could not have put it into words. To cope with it, however, she would give way at times to sudden fits of hot temper, working herself up over everyday trifles that usually left her cold. It relieved her to stamp and then burst into tears at the first sign of opposition. After such outbreaks she would feel much more cheerful, would find it almost easy to be docile and obedient. In some vague, childish way she had hit back at life, and this fact had restored her self-respect.
Anna would send for her turbulent offspring and would say: ‘Stephen darling, Mother’s not really cross—tell Mother what makes you give way to these tempers; she’ll promise to try to understand if you’ll tell her—’
But her eyes would look cold, though her voice might be gentle, and her hand when it fondled would be tentative, unwilling. The hand would be making an effort to fondle, and Stephen would be conscious of that effort. Then looking up at the calm, lovely face, Stephen would be filled with a sudden contrition, with a sudden deep sense of her own shortcomings; she would long to blurt all this out to her mother, yet would stand there tongue-tied, saying nothing at all. For these two were strangely shy with each other—it was almost grotesque, this shyness of theirs, as existing between mother and child. Anna would feel it, and through her Stephen, young as she was, would become conscious of it; so that they held a little aloof when they should have been drawing together.
Stephen, acutely responsive to beauty, would be dimly longing to find expression for a feeling almost amounting to worship, that her mother’s face had awakened. But Anna, looking gravely at her daughter, noting the plentiful auburn hair, the brave hazel eyes that were so like her father’s, as indeed were the child’s whole expression and bearing, would be filled with a sudden antagonism that came very near to anger.
She would awake at night and ponder this thing, scourging herself in an access of contrition; accusing herself of hardness of spirit, of being an unnatural mother. Sometimes she would shed slow, miserable tears, remembering the inarticulate Stephen.
She would think: ‘I ought to be proud of the likeness, proud and happy and glad when I see it!’ Then back would come flooding that queer antagonism that amounted almost to anger.
It would seem to Anna that she must be going mad, for this likeness to her husband would strike her as an outrage—as though the poor, innocent seven-year-old Stephen were in some way a caricature of Sir Philip; a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction—yet she knew that the child was handsome. But now there were times when the child’s soft flesh would be almost distasteful to her; when she hated the way Stephen moved or stood still, hated a certain largeness about her, a certain crude lack of grace in her movements, a certain unconscious defiance. Then the mother’s mind would slip back to the days when this creature had clung to her breast, forcing her to love it by its own utter weakness; and at this thought her eyes must fill again, for she came of a race of devoted mothers. The thing had crept on her like a foe in the dark—it had been slow, insidious, deadly; it had waxed strong as Stephen herself had waxed strong, being part, in some way, of Stephen.
Restlessly tossing from side to side, Anna Gordon would pray for enlightenment and guidance; would pray that her husband might never suspect her feelings towards his child. All that she was and had been he knew; in all the world she had no other secret save this one most unnatural and monstrous injustice that was stronger than her will to destroy it. And Sir Philip loved Stephen, he idolized her; it was almost as though he divined by instinct that his daughter was being secretly defrauded, was bearing some unmerited burden. He never spoke to his wife of these things, yet watching them together, she grew daily more certain that his love for the child held an element in it that was closely akin to pity.
CHAPTER 2
1
At about this time Stephen first became conscious of an urgent necessity to love[1q]. She adored her father, but that was quite different; he was part of herself, he had always been there, she could not envisage the world without him—it was other with Collins, the housemaid. Collins was what was called ‘second of three[2]’; she might one day hope for promotion. Meanwhile she was florid, full-lipped and full-bosomed, rather ample indeed for a young girl of twenty, but her eyes were unusually blue and arresting, very pretty inquisitive eyes. Stephen had seen Collins sweeping the stairs for two years, and had passed her by quite unnoticed; but one morning, when Stephen was just over seven, Collins looked up and suddenly smiled, then all in a moment Stephen knew that she loved her—a staggering revelation!
Collins said politely: ‘Good morning, Miss Stephen.’
She had always said: ‘Good morning, Miss Stephen,’ but on this occasion it sounded alluring—so alluring that Stephen wanted to touch her, and extending a rather uncertain hand she started to stroke her sleeve.
Collins picked up the hand and stared at it. ‘Oh, my!’ she exclaimed, ‘what very dirty nails!’ Whereupon their owner flushed painfully crimson and dashed upstairs to repair them.
‘Put them scissors down this minute, Miss Stephen!’ came the nurse’s peremptory voice, while her charge was still busily engaged on her toilet.
But Stephen said firmly: ‘I’m cleaning my nails ’cause Collins doesn’t like them—she says they’re dirty!’
‘What impudence!’ snapped the nurse, thoroughly annoyed. ‘I’ll thank her to mind her own business!’
Having finally secured the large cutting-out scissors, Mrs. Bingham went forth in search of the offender; she was not one to tolerate any interference with the dignity of her status. She found Collins still on the top flight of stairs, and forthwith she started to upbraid her: ‘putting her back in her place,’ the nurse called it; and she did it so thoroughly that in less than five minutes the ‘second-of-three’ had been told of every fault that was likely to preclude promotion.
Stephen stood still in the nursery doorway. She could feel her heart thumping against her side, thumping with anger and pity for Collins who was answering never a word. There she knelt mute, with her brush suspended, with her mouth slightly open and her eyes rather scared; and when at long last she did manage to speak, her voice sounded humble and frightened. She was timid by nature, and the nurse’s sharp tongue was a byword throughout the household.
Collins was saying: ‘Interfere with your child? Oh, no, Mrs. Bingham, never! I hope I knows my place better than that—Miss Stephen herself showed me them dirty nails; she said: “Collins, just look, aren’t my nails awful dirty!” And I said: “You must ask Nanny about that, Miss Stephen.” Is it likely that I’d interfere with your work? I’m not that sort, Mrs. Bingham.’
Oh, Collins, Collins, with those pretty blue eyes and that funny alluring smile! Stephen’s own eyes grew wide with amazement, then they clouded with sudden and disillusioned tears, for far worse than Collins’ poorness of spirit was the dreadful injustice of those lies—yet this very injustice seemed to draw her to Collins, since despising, she could still love her.
For the rest of that day Stephen brooded darkly over Collins’ unworthiness; and yet all through that day she still wanted Collins, and whenever she saw her she caught herself smiling, quite unable, in her turn, to muster the courage to frown her innate disapproval. And Collins smiled too, if the nurse was not looking, and she held up her plump red fingers, pointing to her nails and making a grimace at the nurse’s retreating figure. Watching her, Stephen felt unhappy and embarrassed, not so much for herself as for Collins; and this feeling increased, so that thinking about her made Stephen go hot down her spine.
In the evening, when Collins was laying the tea, Stephen managed to get her alone. ‘Collins,’ she whispered, ‘you told an untruth—I never showed you my dirty nails!’
‘ ’Course not!’ murmured Collins, ‘but I had to say something—you didn’t mind, Miss Stephen, did you?’ And as Stephen looked doubtfully up into her face, Collins suddenly stooped and kissed her.
Stephen stood speechless from a sheer sense of joy, all her doubts swept completely away. At that moment she knew nothing but beauty and Collins, and the two were as one, and the one was Stephen—and yet not Stephen either, but something more vast, that the mind of seven years found no name for.
The nurse came in grumbling: ‘Now then, hurry up, Miss Stephen! Don’t stand there as though you were daft! Go and wash your face and hands before tea—how many times must I tell you the same thing?’
‘I don’t know—’ muttered Stephen. And indeed she did not; she knew nothing of such trifles at that moment.
2
From now on Stephen entered a completely new world, that turned on an axis of Collins. A world full of constant exciting adventures; of elation, of joy, of incredible sadness, but withal a fine place to be dashing about in like a moth who is courting a candle. Up and down went the days; they resembled a swing that soared high above the tree-tops, then dropped to the depths, but seldom if ever hung midway. And with them went Stephen, clinging to the swing, waking up in the mornings with a thrill of vague excitement—the sort of excitement that belonged by rights to birthdays, and Christmas, and a visit to the pantomime at Malvern. She would open her eyes and jump out of bed quickly, still too sleepy to remember why she felt so elated; but then would come memory—she would know that this day she was actually going to see Collins. The thought would set her splashing in her sitz-bath, and tearing the buttons off her clothes in her haste, and cleaning her nails with such ruthlessness and vigour that she made them quite sore in the process.
She began to be very inattentive at her lessons, sucking her pencil, staring out of the window, or what was far worse, not listening at all, except for Collins’ footsteps. The nurse slapped her hands, and stood her in the corner, and deprived her of jam, but all to no purpose; for Stephen would smile, hugging closer her secret—it was worth being punished for Collins.
She grew restless and could not be induced to sit still even when her nurse read aloud. At one time she had very much liked being read to, especially from books that were all about heroes; but now such stories so stirred her ambition, that she longed intensely to live them. She, Stephen, now longed to be William Tell, or Nelson, or the whole Charge of Balaclava; and this led to much foraging in the nursery rag-bag, much hunting up of garments once used for charades, much swagger and noise, much strutting and posing, and much staring into the mirror. There ensued a period of general confusion when the nursery looked as though smitten by an earthquake; when the chairs and the floor would be littered with oddments that Stephen had dug out but discarded. Once dressed, however, she would walk away grandly, waving the nurse peremptorily aside, going, as always, in search of Collins, who might have to be stalked to the basement.
Sometimes Collins would play up, especially to Nelson. ‘My, but you do look fine!’ she would exclaim. And then to the cook: ‘Do come here, Mrs. Wilson! Doesn’t Miss Stephen look exactly like a boy? I believe she must be a boy with them shoulders, and them funny gawky legs she’s got on her!’
And Stephen would say gravely: ‘Yes, of course I’m a boy. I’m young Nelson, and I’m saying: “What is fear?” you know, Collins—I must be a boy, ’cause I feel exactly like one, I feel like young Nelson in the picture upstairs.’
Collins would laugh and so would Mrs. Wilson, and after Stephen had gone they would get talking, and Collins might say: ‘She is a queer kid, always dressing herself up and play-acting—it’s funny.’
But Mrs. Wilson might show disapproval: ‘I don’t hold with such nonsense, not for a young lady. Miss Stephen’s quite different from other young ladies—she’s got none of their pretty little ways—it’s a pity!’
There were times, however, when Collins seemed sulky when Stephen could dress up as Nelson in vain. ‘Now, don’t bother me, Miss, I’ve got my work to see to!’ or: ‘You go and show Nurse—yes, I know you’re a boy, but I’ve got my work to get on with. Run away.’
And Stephen must slink upstairs thoroughly deflated, strangely unhappy and exceedingly humble, and must tear off the clothes she so dearly loved donning, to replace them by the garments she hated. How she hated soft dresses and sashes, and ribbons, and small coral beads, and openwork stockings! Her legs felt so free and comfortable in breeches; she adored pockets too, and these were forbidden—at least really adequate pockets. She would gloom about the nursery because Collins had snubbed her, because she was conscious of feeling all wrong, because she so longed to be some one quite real, instead of just Stephen pretending to be Nelson. In a quick fit of anger she would go to the cupboard, and getting out her dolls would begin to torment them. She had always despised the idiotic creatures which, however, arrived with each Christmas and birthday.
‘I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!’ she would mutter thumping their innocuous faces.
But one day, when Collins had been crosser than usual, she seemed to be filled with a sudden contrition. ‘It’s me housemaid’s knee[3],’ she confided to Stephen, ‘It’s not you, it’s me housemaid’s knee, dearie.’
‘Is that dangerous?’ demanded the child, looking frightened.
Then Collins, true to her class, said: ‘It may be—it may mean an ’orrible operation, and I don’t want no operation.’
‘What’s that?’ inquired Stephen.
‘Why, they’d cut me,’ moaned Collins; ‘they’d ’ave to cut me to let out the water.’
‘Oh, Collins! What water?’
‘The water in me kneecap—you can see if you press it, Miss Stephen.’
They were standing alone in the spacious night-nursery, where Collins was limply making the bed. It was one of those rare and delicious occasions when Stephen could converse with her goddess undisturbed, for the nurse had gone out to post a letter. Collins rolled down a coarse woollen stocking and displayed the afflicted member; it was blotchy and swollen and far from attractive, but Stephen’s eyes filled with quick, anxious tears as she touched the knee with her finger.
‘There now!’ exclaimed Collins, ‘See that dent? That’s the water!’ And she added: ‘It’s so painful it fair makes me sick. It all comes from polishing them floors, Miss Stephen; I didn’t ought to polish them floors.’
Stephen said gravely: ‘I do wish I’d got it—I wish I’d got your housemaid’s knee, Collins, ’cause that way I could bear it instead of you. I’d like to be awfully hurt for you, Collins, the way that Jesus was hurt for sinners. Suppose I pray hard, don’t you think I might catch it? Or supposing I rub my knee against yours?’
‘Lord bless you!’ laughed Collins, ‘it’s not like the measles; no, Miss Stephen, it’s caught from them floors.’
That evening Stephen became rather pensive, and she turned to the Child’s Book of Scripture Stories and she studied the picture of the Lord on His Cross, and she felt that she understood Him. She had often been rather puzzled about Him, since she herself was fearful of pain—when she barked her shins on the gravel in the garden, it was not always easy to keep back her tears—and yet Jesus had chosen to bear pain for sinners, when He might have called up all those angels! Oh, yes, she had wondered a great deal about Him, but now she no longer wondered.
At bedtime, when her mother came to hear her say her prayers—as custom demanded—Stephen’s prayers lacked conviction. But when Anna had kissed her and had turned out the light, then it was that Stephen prayed in good earnest—with such fervour, indeed, that she dripped perspiration in a veritable orgy of prayer.
‘Please, Jesus, give me a housemaid’s knee instead of Collins—do, do, Lord Jesus. Please, Jesus, I would like to bear all Collins’ pain the way You did, and I don’t want any angels! I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus—I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins—I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were; please, dear Lord Jesus, do let me. Please give me a knee that’s all full of water, so that I can have Collins’ operation. I want to have it instead of her, ’cause she’s frightened—I’m not a bit frightened!’
This petition she repeated until she fell asleep, to dream that in some queer way she was Jesus, and that Collins was kneeling and kissing her hand, because she, Stephen, had managed to cure her by cutting off her knee with a bone paper-knife and grafting it on to her own. The dream was a mixture of rapture and discomfort, and it stayed quite a long time with Stephen.
The next morning she awoke with the feeling of elation that comes only in moments of perfect faith. But a close examination of her knees in the bath, revealed them to be flawless except for old scars and a crisp, brown scab from a recent tumble—this, of course, was very disappointing. She picked off the scab, and that hurt her a little, but not, she felt sure, like a real housemaid’s knee. However, she decided to continue in prayer, and not to be too easily downhearted.
For more than three weeks she sweated and prayed, and pestered poor Collins with endless daily questions: ‘Is your knee better yet?’ ‘Don’t you think my knee’s swollen?’ ‘Have you faith? ’Cause I have—’ ‘Does it hurt you less, Collins?’
But Collins would always reply in the same way: ‘It’s no better, thank you, Miss Stephen.’
At the end of the fourth week Stephen suddenly stopped praying, and she said to Our Lord: ‘You don’t love Collins, Jesus, but I do, and I’m going to get housemaid’s knee. You see if I don’t!’ Then she felt rather frightened, and added more humbly: ‘I mean, I do want to—You don’t mind, do You, Lord Jesus?’
The nursery floor was covered with carpet, which was obviously rather unfortunate for Stephen; had it only been parquet like the drawing-room and study, she felt it would better have served her purpose. All the same it was hard if she knelt long enough—it was so hard, indeed, that she had to grit her teeth if she stayed on her knees for more than twenty minutes. This was much worse than barking one’s shins in the garden; it was much worse even than picking off a scab! Nelson helped her a little. She would think: ‘Now I’m Nelson. I’m in the middle of the Battle of Trafalgar—I’ve got shots in my knees!’ But then she would remember that Nelson had been spared such torment. However, it was really rather fine to be suffering—it certainly seemed to bring Collins much nearer; it seemed to make Stephen feel that she owned her by right of this diligent pain.
There were endless spots on the old nursery carpet, and these spots Stephen could pretend to be cleaning; always careful to copy Collins’ movements, rubbing backwards and forwards while groaning a little. When she got up at last, she must hold her left leg and limp, still groaning a little. Enormous new holes appeared in her stockings, through which she could examine her aching knees, and this led to rebuke: ‘Stop your nonsense, Miss Stephen! It’s scandalous the way you’re tearing your stockings!’ But Stephen smiled grimly and went on with the nonsense, spurred by love to an open defiance. On the eighth day, however, it dawned upon Stephen that Collins should be shown the proof of her devotion. Her knees were particularly scarified that morning, so she limped off in search of the unsuspecting housemaid.
Collins stared: ‘Good gracious, whatever’s the matter? Whatever have you been doing, Miss Stephen?’
Then Stephen said, not without pardonable pride: ‘I’ve been getting a housemaid’s knee, like you, Collins!’ And as Collins looked stupid and rather bewildered—‘You see, I wanted to share your suffering. I’ve prayed quite a lot, but Jesus won’t listen, so I’ve got to get housemaid’s knee my own way—I can’t wait any longer for Jesus!’
‘Oh, hush!’ murmured Collins, thoroughly shocked. ‘You mustn’t say such things: it’s wicked, Miss Stephen.’ But she smiled a little in spite of herself, then she suddenly hugged the child warmly.
All the same, Collins plucked up her courage that evening and spoke to the nurse about Stephen. ‘Her knees was all red and swollen, Mrs. Bingham. Did ever you know such a queer fish as she is? Praying about my knee too. She’s a caution! And now if she isn’t trying to get one! Well, if that’s not real loving then I don’t know nothing.’ And Collins began to laugh weakly.
