Rating: 
Summary: Well Of Lonliness
Review: I read this book 50 years ago and was enraptured with it. I am a male, and at the time of reading, a U.S. Marine who should have been decidely against any form of deviation. But when I read the book, I was so greatly impressed with the pathos of the writer and the beauty of the writing, that I wanted no else in my immediate acquaintence to see this book and possibly ridicule it. You see, I was aboard ship with a battalion of fellow Marines and I knew that such a book would find nothing but patent denigration by "all hands." So,I read the book to last page of this beautiful book, closed it, and with tears in my eyes, dropped it into the Mediterranean Sea. I've never forgotten this book in all these years.
Rating: 
Summary: A must read for anyone who has loved and lost.
Review: I was a late-bloomer to Ms.Hall`s novel. I was given the paperback by an "ex" 12 years ago. She said to me as our relationship ended, "Read this Sean! It sounds like your life!" And so I read about the tormented Stephen coming to turns with his/her gender and sexuality. Brought into the world with a silver spoon and cared for by a "favorite" nanny. Never quite fitting in with ones peers and yet having numerous friends of both sexes. A mother who resented her husband`s devotion to you and a sister who fit in perfectly. It could be anyone`s story or no one`s. But it does reflect the times, then and now. If you have ever felt "different" in your life, a round peg trying to fit in a square peg world or are "accepted" as is. This is your novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Try not to drown...
Review: If there were a dictionary of queer literature Radclyffe Hall would certainly have a place, somewhere between "Hall, Maurice" and "Hallward, Basil". She deserves this for having written a taboo-breaking novel. She does not deserve this for writing a particularly good one.
When I started reading this book I thought I was going to like it a lot more than I did in the end; I thought Stephen as a child was an adorable little gentleman and I liked the relationship between her parents and how it influenced her life. When I reached her first girlfriend, however, a married woman named Angela Crossby, I was at the edge of the abyss without knowing it.
I realize this book is a product of its time, but never in my life have I heard so many cliches and stereotypes about lesbians - sorry, inverts - from a woman who was a lesbian herself. Inverts have terrible nerves. Inverts wrongly cling to religion. A "real" female invert is masculine and a "real" male invert is feminine, whereas their "normal" lovers are truly heterosexual.
More drama and angst are crammed into the last few chapters of the book than I would have thought possible, and the ending - which I will not reveal - comes out of nowhere and contradicts the personalities of Stephen and her lover Mary as they have been previously established. Anyone with an interest in queer literature should read this to satisfy their curiousity, and to deepen their appreciation for better-written and more realistic fiction. Someone who wants a good novel with an intense romance should not.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the scandal it caused
Review: If you're studying lesbian literature, obscenity trials or queer history in general, this book has unfortunately become foundation stuff and might be worth trawling through. If you're a young dyke just starting to read queer writing, it'll just make you feel hopeless and there are far better writers around. Radclyffe Hall may have been a pioneer and a martyr, and she does at least get marks for courage considering the atmosphere of the time, but as a writer she was mediocre (and apparently as a person she was a nasty piece of work).Admittedly, the book is very much a product of its time. Sexual orientation was little understood, gender dysphoria even less so, and Hall appears to have got muddled up between the two. There is a mild stab at scientific explanation (Stephen's parents long for a boy, give her a boy's name, treat her as a boy to a certain extent - and surprise surprise, she grows up to like girls and dress as a man), and a very clear line drawn between "inverts" and "normals" that will make anyone grit their teeth long before they come to the depressing way in which Stephen "heroically" solves her final dilemma. The depiction of the relatively "normal" women Stephen loves as properly girly creatures, who are swayed by the perils of Sapphic passion but are still Real Women underneath, contains some pretty unpleasant stereotypes about bisexuals and "femme" women, and the characterisation throughout neither arouses sympathy in the reader nor particularly convinces. Despite the obscenity trial, there is nothing scandalous in this book beyond the idea that a woman could love women: the dirtiest it gets is the all-concealing line, "...And that night they were not divided." (Sorry if that's a spoiler, but as a friend of mine said, "You mean I've read hundreds of pages about her miserable childhood for *that*?") If you want lesbian sex, there are plenty of writers offering that sort of thing these days, and some of them even write about it well (Emma Donoghue, for instance, who is, incidentally, a vivid, moving and very funny writer). If you're after lesbian literature of that period, go to Virginia Woolf and co. (there are also some excellent anthologies, such as the "Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories" and "Chloe Plus Olivia", that take a literary-historical perspective). If you simply want a well-written book about love between women, again there is far better on offer: the previous two writers and also the likes of Jane Rule and Alice Walker. And if you're interested in transsexuality and the boundaries between genders (not to mention the people who fall in the middle), I can recommend Anna Livia's "Bruised Fruit" and Rose Tremain's "Sacred Country". Spare yourself this.
Rating:
Summary: A Lesbian Bible
Review: It was excatly what a friend told me about this book (read title) that made me wonder and hunt for the book. I read each page with great zest and was engrossed by it until I finshed the last line. I must say it is truely a classic. It is timeless. Through the words of Halls, it is like a journey with her back in time. From a lesbian point of view, on how she (Stephen Gordon) faced the society and like-wise, how the society sees her. The battle of acceptance and other issues along the way. Radclyffe Hall wrote it as fictional tale, not a autobiography even though many would still view so.
Rating:
Summary: The best book ever. I would say that it saved my life.
Review: It's well written, great characters, easy to read and it's revolutionary message is timeless. The Well of Loneliness is my favorite. I read it once a year to keep myself alive.
Rating:
Summary: sisters are doin' it for themselves.
Review: more than merely an amazing piece of literature, _the well of loneliness_ is one of the most significant pieces of history of the twentieth century. a frank portrayal of lesbian life at the turn of the century, it opened the floodgates for subsequent queer (and straight) authors to follow their muse, ambivalent to reproach. though some dismiss the language as stilted and the portrayal of the butch/femme relationship as stereotypical, one would do well to keep in mind the period during which it was published. as gender roles within lesbian relationships were prevalent through the 1950s and beyond, is it any wonder that they were addressed in hall's book? in fact, it would have been a betrayal of hall's own reality to portray her characters in any other fashion. for a classic tale of love, life and homosexuality, one need look no further than radclyffe hall's _the well of loneliness_.
Rating:
Summary: eye-opener
Review: Over a half a century ago (how's that again?) this
book informed me of a human trait that I had never
known existed.It might even today be a sensitive
introduction for some who decry,perhaps to the point
of denial,that it does exist.
A correction to your review. The lead characters were
not lesbians, as I recall. They were young men.
Rating:
Summary: Great Malvern's Greatest Invert
Review: Radclyffe Hall (1883-1943) spent much of her time in Paris in pursuit of her lover, Evguenia Souline, and in many ways it is very difficult to separate Hall's writing from her own life. She had to make a constant effort to endure misunderstanding, intolerance and ostracism -- all because of her sexuality. "The Well of Loneliness" is a classic tale of lesbian love, but 1928 was to prove an unfortunate year for Hall to issue this powerful "crie de coeur." Like D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" a few years later, Hall's novel was banned as obscene after a lengthy and infamous trial. Despite this, "The Well of Loneliness" commands our attention as we watch the lesbian protagonist Stephen Gordon -- a nonconformist, deviant, or to use Hall's own phrase, an "invert" -- stagger so beautifully and chaotically close to the edge of life. In Hall's story, Sir Philip and Lady Gordon crave a son and heir to Morton Hall. Strangely, when their only child is a girl, they name her Stephen. But Stephen's upbringing is a little unorthodox -- she learns to ride, fence and hunt, all so-called masculine pursuits, and before long she recognizes that she is being treated as an outsider by the people of Great Malvern. She stays away from society parties, resists all attempts at heterosexual courtship and, gradually, begins to fell the pain of isolation, venturing to understand herself in quasi-biblical terms as "one of those whom God marked on the forehead...like Cain." Like a raven circling the heart, the social pressures become too much for Stephen. She sets sail for Paris. Without divulging the rest of this tender plot, I will close by saying that I read the last page of this novel and found myself recalling Oscar Wilde, another British homosexual who died of a broken heart, and the pertinent inscription on his tomb in Paris: "And alien tears will fill for him/Pity's long-broken urn/For his mourners will be outcast men/And outcasts always mourn."
Rating:
Summary: Literarey Joy
Review: Regardless of one's orientation, this work should be read - if for no other reason, to ensure oneself that we all are, most beautifully, outside the mold, whether it's in our sexuality or in our particular preferences for coffee or tea. An extremely insightful view of class division, of the courage (and grief)in living one's beliefs, and for those who have been there, a description of the Midlands that one can reach out and touch.
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