Review: The Well of Loneliness

It’s hard to give a review to a book when you really haven’t read any books. It’s partly impossible to read extra material when you are busy reading for your classes and working at the same time. Although, I just finished reading a novel for one of my other classes and thought, “shew, this is the perfect time for me to review my knowledge for my other class while fulfilling an assignment for another.”


The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall is not your ordinary novel. It was written in 1928, with no sense of humor what so ever. It actually fulfills the title given to it. The Well of Loneliness will make you feel as lonely as lonely can feel; it’s like sitting at the bottom of a black hole, with no one close to even hear the echoes of your cries up above. It tells the story of a young girl, who at birth was named “Stephen” by her parents because they had assumed the whole time that they were having a boy. So, instead of changing the name to something a little more girly, they left her with that name. What the story really amounts to is that Stephen is trying to find herself throughout the book. She doesn’t know what to call the feelings that she has for females, not males.

During the days of Stephen, being a lesbian was something that was kept quiet. Her father is the only that knows her secret, and when he dies her mother kicks her out of the house. From there she moves to Paris and becomes her own person. She becomes an ambulance driver during WWI, and meets the person she ends up spending the majority of her life with named Mary, until at the end of the novel; the woman leaves her for Martin, a man that Stephen as a child considered to be her best friend. This causes conflict between the friends (Stephen and Martin) and the soul mates (Stephen and Mary). In the end, Stephen ended her life as an established writer, but she also ended it like she started her life…lonely.