A decade ago, she was told that writing a novel with a lesbian theme would be 'commercial suicide'. Now, gay writers are mainstream. Here, Val McDermid charts the cultural shift that began with Radclyffe Hall
The Independent, Sunday, 12 September 2010
Out and about: Gay characters in Val McDermid's novels are integrated, and not just there to hammer home messages
Eighty-two years ago a well-respected British publisher brought out a new novel from a bestselling, award-winning author. Within weeks, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness had been banned for obscenity by England's chief magistrate and a national newspaper editor had claimed he would rather give a young person cyanide than this pernicious novel.
Hall's crime was not that she wrote about lesbian love (albeit in some of the most glum and leaden prose ever pressed into the service of sapphism) but that her fiction was accessible to a mass audience who would be unfamiliar with contemporary literary fiction such as Virginia Woolf's Orlando or Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. It was, apparently, safe for intellectuals to be exposed to what Hall called "congenital sexual inverts", but not for the common reader.
The establishment had their way with The Well of Loneliness. But they'd be birling in their boxes at the notion that British lesbian writers would ever take as big a share of sales and kudos as we currently do. There's no doubt about it: in the UK, we are currently punching far above our weight in the literary boxing ring.
The full piece at The Independent.
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