The Gender and Diversity Course Catalog for the 2026/27 winter semester is now online

John Radclyffe Hall, also known by the pen name Radclyffe Hall, was a lesbian poet and author of Anglo-American Modernism in the early 20th century.
She was born in 1880 under the name Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, but later used the name John Radclyffe Hall in private and described her own identity as “invert.” This term was developed in the early 20th century by self-proclaimed sexologists to “explain” queer sexualities. It referred to a homosexual person who—in accordance with the binary gender concepts prevalent at the time—dressed and behaved like the supposedly opposite gender. Today we would likely say: a gender-nonconforming lesbian. From 1915 until her death in 1943, Hall lived with her partner, Una Tourbridge, as “joint heads of household” and dressed in a stereotypically masculine manner.
Today, Radclyffe Hall is best known for her very open approach to her sexuality—which was highly unconventional for the time—as well as for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). The novel’s main character, Stephen, is also an “invert,” just as Hall herself was. The book follows Stephen’s journey of self-discovery, career, and romantic adventures against the backdrop of World War I.
Hall’s positive portrayal of lesbian sexuality and love in this novel garnered both acclaim and negative attention: The novel was viewed as a danger to the public by people who called themselves “moralists,” and a lawsuit for obscenity was filed against Hall and the book. This led to the destruction of copies of the novel that had already been printed, and the book was not published in the United Kingdom for 20 years.
Today, The Well of Loneliness is known as “a classic of queer British literature and a reminder of the long history of marginalization, oppression, and censorship of non-heteronormative literature in the British context,” as TU lecturer Christina Slopek-Hauff describes the book.
Anyone who is now interested in exploring this iconic text of modern queer literature further should not miss the seminar The Well of Loneliness: Gender and Sexuality in the Modernist Novel . In this course, the novel is read through the lens of gender studies and queer theory to examine various approaches to representing and analyzing Stephen’s experiences. The course takes into account both the historical context of modernism and contemporary perspectives on gender.