This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.

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The Water Doctor's Daughters is the fascinating tale of Dr James Marsden, a wealthy nineteenth-century homeopathist and water-cure practitioner, and his troubled family life. Though Marsden's children grew up knowing some of the most famous personalities of the day, including Charles Darwin and Alfred Tennyson, they were severely emotionally deprived. Their mother had died in childbirth and Marsden himself was both self-absorbed and autocratic. In 1852 he employed French born Celestine Doudet as a governess. Doudet came highly recommended, having once served as wardrobe mistress to Queen Victoria. Within weeks she had accused the doctor's five young daughters of 'self-abuse'. Marsden urged the governess to do everything in her power to 'cure' them, condoning the use of physical restraints and insisting on a rigid homeopathic diet aimed at decreasing sensuality. By the autumn of 1853 Marian Marsden and her sister Lucy were dead and the governess was charged with manslaughter and cruelty. Two sensational trials followed, but who was more culpable - the girls' father or their governess?

Elizabeth Blackwell, though born in England, was reared in the United States and was the first woman to receive a medical degree here, obtaining it from the Geneva Medical College, Geneva, New York, in 1849. A pioneer in opening the medical profession to women, she founded hospitals and medical schools for women in both the United States and England. She was a lecturer and writer as well as an able physician and organizer. -- H.W. Orr.