With Batten, Radclyffe-Hall converted to Catholicism in the company of Una, she pursued an interst in animals and spiritualism. But before Batten died in 1916, Radclyffe-Hall, known in private as 'John', had taken up with the second love of her life, Una, Lady Troubridge, who gave up her own creative aspirations (she was the first English translator of the French novelist Colette) to manage the household which she shared with 'John' for 28 years. Batten and Radclyffe Hall entered into a long-term relationship. In 1907, she met a middle-aged fashionable singer, Mrs Mabel Batten, known as 'Ladye', who introduced her to influential people. In the drawing rooms of Edwardian society, Marguerite made a small name as a poet and librettist. Mother on the south coast of England perhaps battered Radclyffe Hall, whose father, a playboy, known as 'Rat', meanwhile ignored her.

A lifelong campaigner for gay rights and animal rights, Duffy is also president of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society.People in Great Britain and the United States originally banned The Well of Loneliness (1928), obscene novel of British writer Marguerite Radclyffe Hall. She became a full-time writer in the 1960s, and has since written numerous screenplays, poetry and novels. Maureen Duffy was born in 1933 and educated at Kings College London. She died in 1943 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. Hall wrote many books but is best known for The Well of Loneliness, first published in 1928. She fell in love and lived with an older woman before settling down with Una Troubridge, a married sculptor. After an unhappy childhood, she inherited her father's estate and from then on was free to travel and live as she chose. 'One of the first and most influential contributions of gay and lesbian literature' - New Statesman

'The archetypal lesbian novel' - Times Literary Supplement This Penguin edition includes a new introduction by Maureen Duffy. Hall herself, however, saw the book as a pioneer work and today it is recognised as a landmark work of gay fiction. Charting her romantic and professional adventures during the First World War and beyond, the novel provoked a furore on first publication in 1928 for its lesbian heroine and led to a notorious legal trial for obscenity. The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomboyish Stephen, who hunts, wears trousers and cuts her hair short - and who gradually comes to realise that she is attracted to women. New to Penguin Modern Classics, the seminal work of gay literature that sparked an infamous legal trial for obscenity and went on to become a bestseller.

The well of loneliness