The talk will reflect on goals and ambitions of a new AHRC-funded project (2025-2029) that seeks to develop innovative methods of engaging audiences with LGBTQ+ heritage. Debates about inclusive heritage and diverse representation raise thorny questions about how we can engage in meaningful ways with contentious historical sources while making space for underrepresented voices and perspectives. 

100 Years of The Well of Loneliness turns to the most famous banned novel in LGBTQ+ history to address these problems. Published and censored as obscene in the UK in 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness has, over the last 100 years, offered support and affirmation as well as education and understanding to generations of LGBTQ+ as well as heterosexual and cisgender readers across the world. Despite its status as the so-called ‘Lesbian Bible’, the novel has also alienated, offended, shocked, and divided audiences and continues to inspire debates about its politics, value, and place within the literary canon and the LGBTQ+ archive.

The project will grapple with the ways in which LGBTQ+ voices have been censored and silenced whilst acknowledging how a canonical novel like The Well has itself alienated, excluded, and divided readers. To explore these important yet fraught histories, the project will use a range of research methods (including oral history, reception studies, archival research, translation studies, visual culture studies, and engaged research) and foster new collaborations to test different forms of creative and engagement practice.  These collaborations will provide vital opportunities to develop creative practices and engagement methods that can facilitate conversations about controversial and contentious histories, value different points of view, and promote understanding, solidarity, learning, and connection among different audiences.

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Meeting ID: 386 567 306 863

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