After Jonathan Cape was issued with a summons to appear at Bow Street court in November 1928 for having published The Well of Loneliness, the novel's author, Radclyffe Hall, spent part of the tense wait for trial listening to her lover, Una Troubridge, reading aloud from Virginia Woolf's new book, Orlando. Hall's novel would be banned; Woolf's would not. The two works represent contrasting tendencies in queer fiction: in Hall, an engagement – albeit a pessimistic one – with the social given; in Woolf, an optimistic speculation on alternative possibilities.

The central character of Hall's book, Stephen Gordon, is lonely because she is an “invert” – that is her fate. Congenitally third-sexed, slim-hipped from the cradle, she and another woman of her own masculine kind could never love each other. Yet when she does fall in love with a suitably opposite, feminine woman, conscience forces her to give her up, because such a paragon of real womanhood as Mary Llewellyn can only be fulfilled by getting married to a man and bearing children. Although Stephen is presented as a case study, she is hardly typical. She is anomalous even within her own category of anomalies. Upper class and rich, expressing her author's deeply conservative attitudes to the ownership and husbandry of land, the hierarchy of social order, and the superiority of Englishness, she is disabled by the thought that her lesbianism excludes her from the enjoyment of her natural class privileges.