Group Read, October 2020: The Well of Loneliness

Our October group read is The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Please join in the read and post any comments on this thread.

Having nominated it, I really am going to have to read it now, aren't I?

I am planning on reading it but probably won't be starting it until later in the month.

very interested to hear your thoughts on this one. I read it a few years ago:

http://arukiyomi.com/?p=6059

I'll join in the group read this month. It's been a while! The last three months have been books I had already read. I'll start as soon as I finish my current book The House of the Spirits, which should be Wednesday or so.

I'm at page 100, 1/5th of the way through. I have to say it's not grabbing me. Not hating it, just not liking it much either.

I've started The Well of Loneliness and as >6 Helenliz: says above, it's not totally grabbing me yet, but it is a fairly easy read so I will just keep going and hopefully I will become engaged with the characters at some point.

I've completed my read of The Well of Loneliness and I can't say that I enjoyed the read much. I don't think I got a lot out of the book other than how incredibly sad and difficult it was to be different from the norm in those days.

Half way...
I'm intrigued by the use of the description "invert". Is she trying not to say lesbian, or is there something else at play here that I'm not aware of.

>9 Helenliz: I believe "invert" was the "medical" term in use at the time, and wikipedia agrees:

Sexual inversion is a term used by sexologists, primarily in the late 19th and early 20th century, to refer to homosexuality. Sexual inversion was believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and dress and vice versa. The sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing described female sexual inversion as "the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom".

Initially confined to medical texts, the concept of sexual inversion was given wide currency by Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which was written in part to popularize the sexologists' views. Published with a foreword by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, it consistently used the term "invert" to refer to its protagonist, who bore a strong resemblance to one of Krafft-Ebing's case studies.

I remember seeing "invert" a lot in Proust. I think that is the first time I came across the word.

I am a little more than half-way through. I have been very frustrated with Stephen (who names a girl Stephen without anyone seeming to notice?). Puddle tries several times to help her, hinting that she has personal experience with what Stephen is going through, but is largely ignored. It seems unlikely that Stephen would live with Puddle for many years, yet be oblivious to the fact that she is a lesbian too.

I finished. One I wont be reading again. I can appreciate it as being historically important, I can understand it being a brave novel for its time. I just didn't think it was very good and it's not aged terribly well.

I agree with >11 BentleyMay: in 496 pages no-one ever says, "Stephen, huh, that's an odd name for a girl.". And for someone who is, at times, very sensitive to atmosphere and unspoken dislike, she seems curiously dense to Puddle and her history.

I also thought that this was going to have an interesting nature vs nurture debate element, but every time the point was made that this is something that is inherrent at birth.

Let's look on the positive side, that's another I can tick off the list and send to the charity shop.