Last week as part of the London Literature Festival there was a sort of Gay Good Read event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Eight of us – authors - each talked about a book. Sarah Mcleod – who has written a quirky, delightful debut novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash – chose Crocodile Soup by Julia Darling. Before her talk she went to the front of the stage with a pineapple, took an orange and a hammer from a carrier bag and as she whacked at the orange asked the audience ‘What book’s that?’ Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit someone yelled and the pineapple was theirs.

This cameo was staged, I think, to reflect the scorn of the Lavender Library organisers at the way Jeanette Winterson declined their invitation to take part. Paul Burston wrote in Time Out on 26 June that in her refusal she told them she thought gay literary events ‘divisive and unnecessary’. Apparently she was ruder than that. ‘I hope lesbian readers will remember that comment the next time she has a book out’ Burston wrote.

I’d have taken scant notice of such shenanigans had I not suffered Winterson at the Shakespeare & Company festival ‘Real Lives, Biography and Memoir’ in Paris earlier in the month. Overall it was a brilliant festival superbly organised and with an impressive line-up. My event was billed as ‘1928: The Well of Loneliness, Orlando and The Ladies Almanack: Jeanette Winterson and Diana Souhami in conversation’. I was pleased to be invited and confident I had a contribution to make. God knows I’ve written enough about Radclyffe Hall, the love affairs coded into Orlando, the freedom of Paris for literary lesbians like Djuna Barnes.

Way before the event I suggested to Winterson that we meet ‘to talk about what we were going to talk about’. She didn’t respond. Half an hour before it I went to her Paris flat. She’d been shopping. I outlined the themes I hoped we’d touch on….

You clearly know a lot about it, she said.

We’re billed as in conversation, I put to her.

Nobody would want to hear us talking to each other, she said. That would be really boring.

What then? I asked.

It’ll be fine.

There was a table, two chairs, two microphones. Winterson adjusted both microphones toward herself. I sat to one side. ‘I like to stand up for these things’ she said but then sat down perhaps because I was there. Someone gave me a hand-held mike. Winterson launched into a winsome sermon: The Well of Loneliness was the worst book ever written, Radclyffe Hall was ghastly, without imagination or style. She picked up my copy of The Well and in a mocking voice read out a passage I’d marked. I felt like Edna Everage’s Madge. This too will pass, I thought. I managed a brief interjection: yes, it was a naive book, embarrassing, but the point was that it was ‘consigned to the King’s furnace’ because the Crown Prosecution ruled the subject matter of lesbianism inadmissible in fiction.

That was enough from me. Orlando, Winterson declaimed to her audience, now that was a splendid work of art… Biography was a waste, it didn’t matter who did what and when, what mattered was art, the creative imagination - her own perhaps and Virginia Woolf’s. I tried to interject… Coded into Orlando… Violet Trefusis… I gave up and stopped listening.

On 27 June The Times published Winterson’s harangue. In print it seemed worse than when she blew me out with it in Paris. It appeared under the heading ‘Jeanette Winterson pitches Virginia Woolf’s Orlando against The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.’

There was a mistake in every line. Here are a few:

Orlando, she says, begins ‘He, for there could be no doubt about his sex.’

But Orlando begins ‘He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though…’. How could Woolf write ‘doubt about’… Even in the holograph first draft she tried ‘doubt as to’ then corrected it, such was her alertness to style. And she was too intelligent and ironic to be as categorical as Winterson makes her seem with that full point.

‘The Well of Loneliness, Winterson writes, purported to be telling the truth about the “third sex”. For this reason it was banned in in Britain until 1960…. there is no sex in it at all.’

But The Well was banned as obscene in 1928 and burned because the government of the day deemed the subject of lesbianism ‘inadmissible in fiction’. The book was, said the Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip “propaganda for the practice which has long been known as Lesbianism, a well-known vice, unnatural, destructive….’ The ban on it was lifted in 1949, not 1960.

‘When’ Winterson writes ‘The Well was published, the Daily Express reviewer wrote “I would rather give a healthy boy or healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.”’

But this was not from a review in the Daily Express. It was from the leading article – five columns of diatribe - in the Sunday Express by the paper’s editor James Douglas under the headline A BOOK THAT MUST BE SUPPRESSED.

The Well, she writes, though banned in Britain ‘was published in France and copies were shipped across the Channel to eager readers’.

But it was not published in France. And copies printed from plates smuggled over to Paris were seized by the police when they reached England.

‘What a relief’ she writes, ‘to find Woolf’s Orlando published six months later.’

But The Well was published on 27 July 1928 and Orlando on 11 October – three months later.

So it goes on – I can’t be bothered to list half of it. But never mind if she’s weak on accuracy and thoughtfulness, she sure does make up for it in opinion and self-promotion.

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