The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the British author
Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman
from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" (homosexuality) is
apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she
meets while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, but their
happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which
Hall depicts as having a debilitating effect on inverts. The novel
portrays inversion as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit
plea: "Give us also the right to our existence". The novel became the
target of a campaign by James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express
newspaper, who wrote "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy
girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." Although its only sexual
reference consists of the words "and that night, they were not divided",
a British court judged it obscene because it defended "unnatural
practices between women". In the United States the book survived legal
challenges in New York state and in Customs Court.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_of_Loneliness>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1590:
Anne of Denmark was crowned Queen consort of Scotland in the
abbey church at Holyrood Palace.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Denmark>
1863:
Rosalía de Castro published Cantares gallegos, a collection of
her poetry, the first book in the Galician language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosal%C3%ADa_de_Castro>
1914:
Albania officially recognized the area of Northern Epirus as an
autonomous region within the Albanian state, which was never established
due to World War I.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_of_Corfu>
1995:
After 18 years as Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac was
inaugurated as President of France.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Chirac>
2004:
Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex
marriage.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Massachusetts>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
morpheme:
(linguistics) The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry
a meaning, such as "un-", "break", and "-able" in the word
"unbreakable".
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morpheme>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Affection is the greatest of human feelings because it is made of
respect, of lucidity, and light. To understand the truth and make one's
self equal to it is everything; and to love is the same thing as to know
and to understand. Affection, which I call also compassion, because I
see no difference between them, dominates everything by reason of its
clear sight. It is a sentiment as immense as if it were mad, and yet it
is wise, and of human things it is the only perfect one. There is no
great sentiment which is not completely held on the arms of compassion.
--Henri Barbusse
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henri_Barbusse>