page_title: Lesbian literature
section_title: 1900–1950:  Beginnings
hierarchical_section_title: Lesbian literature / Modern history / 1900–1950:  Beginnings
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of "The Well of Loneliness" by Radclyffe Hall. Permabooks P112, 1951. Français&#160;: Couverture de "The Well of Loneliness" (Le Puits de solitude) par Radclyffe Hall. Permabooks P112, 1951.
context_page_description: Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics.
  Fiction that falls into this category may be of any genre, such as historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance.
context_section_description: The first novel in the English language recognised as having a lesbian theme is The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, which a British court found obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women". The book was banned in Britain for decades; this is in the context of the similar censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which also had a theme of transgressive female sexuality, albeit heterosexual. In the United States, The Well of Loneliness survived legal challenges in New York and the U.S. Customs Court.
  In 1923, Elsa Gidlow, born in England, published the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry in the United States, titled On a Grey Thread.
  In the early 20th century, an increasingly visible lesbian community in Paris which centered on literary salons hosted by French lesbians as well as expatriates like Nathalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, who produced lesbian-themed works in French and English, including Nightwood by Djuna Barnes,  Idyll Saphique by Liane de Pougy, poetry by Renee Vivien,  Barney's own epigrams, poetry, and several works by Stein.  Radclyffe Hall also spent time in Paris at Barney's salon and modeled one of her characters in The Well of Loneliness after her.
  Japanese writer Nobuko Yoshiya was an important early 20th century author of stories about intense romance between young women, though her writing was accepted in mainstream culture because none of the relationships were consummated.
  Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel of a high-spirited gender-bending poet who lives for centuries, Orlando, which was said to be based on her lover, Vita Sackville-West, was re-examined in the 1970s as a 'subversive' lesbian text.
  Other examples of 1920s lesbian literature include poems by Amy Lowell about her partner of over a decade Ada Dwyer Russell. Lowell wanted to dedicate her books to Dwyer who refused as they had to hide the nature of their relationship except for one time in a non-poetry book in which Lowell wrote, "To A.D.R., This, and all my books. A.L." Examples of these love poems to Dwyer include the Taxi, Absence, In a Garden, Madonna of the Evening Flowers, Opal, and Aubade. Lowell admitted to John Livingston Lowes that Dwyer was the subject of her series of romantic poems titled "Two Speak Together". Lowell's poems about Dwyer have been called the most explicit and elegant lesbian love poetry during the time between the ancient Sappho and poets of the 1970s. Unfortunately, most of the primary document romantic letters of communication between the two were destroyed by Dwyer at Lowell's request, leaving much unknown about the details of their life together.
  Most American literature of the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s presented lesbian life as tragedy, ending with either the suicide of the lesbian character or her conversion to heterosexuality. This was required so that the authorities did not declare the literature obscene.  For example, The Stone Wall, a lesbian autobiography with an unhappy ending, was published in 1930 under the pseudonym Mary Casal. It was one of the first lesbian autobiographies. Yet as early as 1939, Frances V. Rummell, an educator and a teacher of French at Stephens College, published the first explicitly lesbian autobiography in which two women end up happily together, titled Diana: A Strange Autobiography. This autobiography was published with a note saying, "The publishers wish it expressly understood that this is a true story, the first of its kind ever offered to the general reading public". However, literary critics have since called the autobiography 'fictional'.
  Jane Bowles' only novel, Two Serious Ladies, published in 1943, told the story of a romance between an upper class woman and a prostitute in a run-down Panamanian port town.
caption: Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel The Well Of Loneliness faced censorship in the U.S. and Britain.
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