For #LGBThistorymonth I will be posting a #womaninhistory every day. Today is Radclyffe Hall, an English poet and author. She is best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature which was thought obscene at the time and subsequently banned in Britain and the U.S. Hall had omitted sections of the novel from her earlier drafts which were more explicit, but the ban itself was because it argued that lesbian sexuality and gender non-conformity should be accepted by society, not sexual content. 

Hall wrote the book in order to help a very much misunderstood and therefore unfortunate section of society and has since been named the first portrayal of a ‘butch’ woman. Hall received support from thousands of readers, who wrote to her in outrage at the ban and a number of authors rallied to her cause including Vera Brittain, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Although Hall did not live to see the ban in Britain overturned in 1948, she did see the verdict overturned in the U.S.  

Hall’s other work dealt with similar themes, her volume of stories Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself described how British society utilised ‘masculine’ women during the First World War and then dropped them afterwards.