For more reasons than its title, The Well of Loneliness is an embarrassment: its tendentious prose and repeated exhortations to God, its theory of lesbians as a third sex and failed men … why, reading it’s enough to turn a queer girl straight.

Dull it is, lewd it isn’t. But eighty years ago it was judged an obscene libel by England’s law lords who had it burned in the King’s Furnace. It was destroyed solely because of its theme, for ‘and that night they were not divided’ is as hot as its description of lesbian lovemaking gets. Its theme inflamed the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Archibald Bodkin, his deputy Sir George Stephenson, the Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron, the Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip, the Chairman of the Appeal Court Sir Robert Wallace and other peers of the realm, guardians of the nation’s morals and members of the Garrick Club who believed this book would corrupt the morals of the young.

‘It is a plea not only for the toleration but for the recognition of sexual perversion amongst women,’ lamented Sir George.

‘It is inherently obscene and gravely detrimental to the public interest,’ averred Sir William.

‘These unnatural offences between women which are the subject of this book involve acts which between men would be a criminal offence, and involve acts of the most horrible, unnatural and disgusting obscenity,’ explained Sir Chartres.

‘It is more subtle, demoralising, corrosive and corruptive than anything ever written,’ wailed Sir Robert.

‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body but moral poison kills the soul,’ raged James Douglas editor of the Express.

So horrified were the oligarchs by a book about lesbians, they manipulated the procedures of the law to achieve the silence they desired. They disallowed trial by jury or any expert evidence which might have helped the case for the defence.

I wrote my biography of Radclyffe Hall nine years ago. I called it The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, for her whole life was a trial, though it was outrage at the banning of her book and scorn for the process of law by which it was banned which prompted me to write about her.

Over the past weeks I have been, and in the weeks to come I shall be, writing ‘anniversary’ articles and giving ‘anniversary’ talks defending publication of the woeful Well.

Eighty years is not that long ago. As late as 1946 the 1928 ban was upheld by the postwar Labour administration: ‘From the Home Office point of view it would be most undesirable to have the question reopened…’ a spokesman for James Chuter Ede the Home Secretary said.

The use of the law to enforce silence is more than depressing. It is crippling for a dedicated writer to have her work destroyed. Historically, lesbian writers have taken flak from family too. ‘You can’t touch filth without getting filthy’ Radclyffe Hall’s mother said to her when trouble erupted over The Well.

Four years earlier, when Vita Sackville-West and Violet Keppel, under the guise of fiction and changed gender, wrote an account of their intense love affair, both their mothers insisted proofs be destroyed and publication defeated. They paid the publisher off. The book had variously been called Rebellion, Endeavour, Challenge, but Conformity won the day. ‘I hope Mama is pleased,’ Vita wrote in her diary. ‘She has beaten me.’ ‘It is nobody’s business to know our private lives,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her own Book of Reminiscences. ‘The less said about it the better. Silence is wiser. Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.’

And when the Washington Post published a review, under the heading ‘Sappho sings in Washington’, of Natalie Barney’s Sonnets de Femmes - poems in French about her lovers - her father sailed to Paris, bought up and destroyed the printer’s plates and all available copies of the book and took his daughter home to Cincinatti.

So it goes on: the nervous connection between sexual freedoms and the law, between candid expression and causing offence, between writers who by definition try to push against walls of silence and their detractors who view silence as wise.

I never talked of my lesbianism or hopes as a writer with my parents ‘toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire’. My mother though, without reference to their content, kept my books stacked on show on her coffee table and viewed one in particular of my partners as her friend. And my father after publication of my first book – a biography of the society painter Gluck – and a consequent piece about me in the Observer, phoned to say ‘it’ (you know what) made no difference to his love for me.

More recently, fictionalised references to the narrator’s mother in my latest book Coconut Chaos incurred high-handed disapproval from my three brothers. They emailed a Severe Warning:

…Your semi-factual use of private family matters means that Mark, Stephen and I will need to watch out for what you write about the family in any future book. We may need to challenge remarks that we consider defamatory. Fortunately the lawyers seem very aware of the consequences of defamation and of breaches of the Data Protection Act.

Yours

Robert

That was December 2006. It marked the end of our never-very-encouraging stabs at communication. I didn’t reply. It was a disconcerting email to receive on the eve of publication. How odd, I thought, to use the word ‘fortunately’ in the context of threatened legal challenge to publication of a book by me. But at least in this particular corner of the world, eighty years on from the woeful Well, lesbians and lesbian writers and writers about lesbians and writers who push at the walls of silence, are better placed to withstand onslaught from family and the law than in 1928.

We London Library wallahs have been sent a four-page letter from our President Sir Tom Stoppard. This letter tells us our annual subscription’s to go up from £210 to £375. It’s oddly prolix in style ‘In common with thousands of institutions and societies of all kinds the London Library is not constituted as an Athenian democracy…’, unapologetic in its apologies ‘I wish I had been alert enough to write to you in advance and not in arrears. Perhaps then we might have lost fewer of the 34 members who have resigned’ (34, that’s a piddling number), and grandiose in its self-deprecation - ‘I’m sorry that I was not present at the AGM nor the run-up to it. (I had a play opening in New York, which entails the duty of attending the previews and finding fault with anything except the script.)’

But its essence is firm: like it or lump it, pay it or go away, there will be an 80 per cent rise in membership subscription this year. Back of the envelope accounting shows that’s over a pound a day or a full shelf, for keeps, of almost anything you want or need, if you buy from AbeBooks. Subscribing is a reminder of the remorselessness of time. Copies of the LRB, the Literary Review, The Rambler, and Birds, clack through my letterbox are skimmed and recycled. Nor have I got my monies worth from the Tate Modern, the NFT, the ICA.But I want to keep some semblance of belonging, and what I love best about the London Library is we don’t pay fines. I hate fines not because of the money, but because they make me feel dreary, in the wrong, punished. I never manage to get books back to public libraries on the assigned day. Never have. I don’t know why because I’m a punctual person. Three weeks, six weeks pass as in a haze and I’ve read/used none or two of the books but never all six. For decades and all over England I’ve posted back library books (why do they wrap them in those slimy covers) and rescinded membership rights rather than face the demand for the paltry fines.

At the London Library you can keep books out as long as you like, provided they’re not wanted by another reader. If they are, you must return them within a fortnight or forfeit borrowing rights. It’s a manageable rule and suits me fine.Another pleasure is burrowing for yourself among the stacks of books and weird periodicals. And another, in prospect only for me as yet, is falling asleep in the comfy leather chairs in the reading room by, in winter, the real fire. So I’ll renew my far from cost-effective subscription, and hope the money’s not spent on too much refurbishing of the peeling paint and dusty shelves and quaint old-fashioned air. Our President writes ominously about ‘keeping up’ not ‘falling back’, though keeping up’s a bewildering business when it comes to the world of books.

In a her book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Janet Malcolm writes of biography as a thieving trade:

‘The biographer at work is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money and triumphantly bearing his loot away. …. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking…’

In her latest book Two Lives – Gertrude and Alice Janet Malcolm makes no reference to me or to my book Gertrude and Alice – reprinted five times. None the less within thirty very short pages fifteen of her anecdotes are the same as those used in my book, and of the ten photographs reproduced by her, five are the same as those used by me. Perhaps such use is coincidental and even if it isn’t the anecdotes and photographs are at source archival. But the title wasn’t from any archive. The ‘certain drawer’ it came from was my head.

Do I mind? Well I feel a bit duffed up. Am I glad to read Philip Hensher’s thumbs down review of Janet Malcolm’s book in The Daily Telegraph, his opinion that Stein’s life was interesting enough to ‘merit the ongoing series of books, many quite excellent’ about her and Alice B. Toklas and his verdict that ‘Diana Souhami’s irresistibly charming Gertrude and Alice wins by a neck in a hectic field. Malcolm’s book is much less ambitious, abandoning narrative biography for some sketches of the problems in Stein scholarship.’

Well up to a point I’m glad. But I didn’t choose to go into the burglary business, or to go in for hectic races. My hopes as a writer were and remain quite other. But perhaps Janet Malcolm doesn’t know I exist, or that I wrote a book called Gertrude and Alice and introductions to the Folio Society edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and the Bantam Classics edition of Stein’s Three Lives. And I’m sure she doesn’t know I wrote a radio play A Horse Called Gertrude Stein where the mare in a point to point sits down while the other competitors race round her.What’s the point of grumping. None of it lasts. On to the next minor offering in a thieving world.