A literature of our own
Eighty years after Radclyffe Hall wrote the radical novel The Well of Loneliness, is there still any need for novels to be categorised as lesbian, asks Julie Bindel writing in The Guardian.

Before the publication of her novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928, the writer Radclyffe Hall, a lesbian from an upper-class family in Bournemouth, warned her editor that the book would require a mammoth commitment from its publisher. "I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world," she announced portentously.
"So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction."

Hall's novel chronicles the life of Stephen Gordon, an English woman from an upper-class family, whose "sexual inversion" (as the likes of sexologist Havelock Ellis described homosexuality at that time) is apparent from an early age. It thus became the first novel ever to openly address lesbianism. Gordon falls for Mary Llewellyn, a woman she meets while serving as an ambulance driver in the first world war, but the couple's happiness is ruined by their social rejection. A silent plea of "allow us the right to our existence" runs throughout the narrative, as the characters descend into despair, relieved only by copious amounts of cocaine and creme de menthe.
To read the artricle go to the Guardian online.