ABSTRACT
O f the crop of novels about homosexual love produced after the First World War - Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, MacKenzie’s Extraordinary Women, Bowen’s The Hotel, Woolfs Orlando and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness - it was Hall’s novel which became and has remained by far the most popular. For whether one defines the popular as noncanonical, or oppositional, or simply as that kind of writing which attempts to popularise more specialised forms of discourse, The Well of Loneliness can claim to fulfil all these conditions. The reasons for its popularity are themselves worth considering.
