As a Lover

In London in 1928, trainee firefighter Maggie Dillon struggles with the meaning of a kiss she shared with another woman. Shame and fear have left her unsure whether the feelings she cannot dismiss have a place in the world around her. At the same time, novelist Radclyffe Hall prepares to challenge prevailing attitudes through The Well of Loneliness. The book’s appearance attracts hostile press attention and a campaign that threatens to silence it. Maggie’s personal search for understanding unfolds alongside that public battle over whether lesbian lives can be acknowledged at all. As a reader and a writer face very different forms of opposition, the novel connects the possibility of love with the struggle to make it visible.