THE WELL OF LONELINESS [Signed Limited Edition] HALL, Radclyffe LGBTQ Literature & Emphemera,Limited Editions,Modernism,Signed Books,Women

Tall octavos. Gold cloth, blue paper, embossed with silver Art Deco design stamped on upper panel and spine. Frontispiece portrait. Two volumes; xxiv, 506 pp. Top edge gilt, fore-edges uncut; spines sunned, silver gilt rubbed, as usual. A few preliminary leaves faintly foxed, else pages bright and clean. A very good or better set of an important early icon of queer literature. Victory edition, limited edition. Commentary by Havelock Ellis, an author's note, and an Introduction by Morris L. Ernst explaining at length the entirety of the prelude to the proceedings against publication of this title, and their outcome. Next is an impressive list of some of the writers, artists, publishers, and publicists who protested against the suppression of the publication of The Well of Loneliness; finally, the Author's Preface thanks those who supported her book. To quote the colophon, "The Victory Edition of THE WELL OF LONELINESS, with a specially designed title page by S. A. Jacobs, has been printed by the Quinn & Boden Company of Rahway, New Jersey, June MCMXXIX, on Van Gelder handmade paper. The edition consists of two hundred and twenty-five copies, numbered from 1 to 225 and signed by the author, of which two hundred and one, numbered 24 to 225, are offered for sale. This is number 128." The Well of Loneliness, an expansive novel in which Stephen Gordon, a masculine-presenting lesbian, is spurned by society and by her own mother in her quest for love and acceptance. Her journey takes her from the battlefields of the First World War to bohemian Paris, where there were no laws prohibiting same-sex relationships between men, and where gay subcultures thrived. And yet, despite all her searching, Stephen still finds that society s view of sexuality is at odds with her happiness, and the novel ends with Stephen s earnest prayer to God to "Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!" .