By contrast, psychoanalysts saw homosexuality as a form of arrested mental development in the homosexual person, and not something that was a result of their family's mental and emotional history. It is also one of the parts of the book that drew the most criticism from the lesbian community, in that it was suggested that the book promoted shame among homosexual women, with its inference that homosexual children were only produced by those who had mental illnesses in their family. The book states that homosexuality is common where there is a familial history of mental illness, which seems to be a rather negative statement it also leads Stephen to see herself as someone ugly and damaged in a psychological and physical sense. The work of the real-life psychologists iPs woven into the narrative for example, Kraft-Ebbing's book Psychopathia Sexualis is the first that she finds in the secret book-case in her father's study after his death.

They considered it a sexual inversion and as such termed homosexuals as 'inverts'. Both believed that homosexuality was a trait that one was born with and that it was not alterable. Hall, already a successful poet and novelist, did not write The Well of Lonelinesspurely as an exercise in producing lesbian fiction her prime objective was to popularize relatively new ideas and studies of human sexual interests and behaviors, and to promote the work of new sexologists like Richard von Kraft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis. Written by Polly Barbour and other people who wish to remain anonymous

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Radclyffe hall's the well of loneliness