Sir Philip's death deprived his child of three things; of companionship of mind born of real understanding, of a stalwart barrier between her and the world, and above all of love-- than faithful love that would gladly have suffered all things for her sake, in order to spare her suffering.
Stephen [the heroine], recovering from the merciful numbness of shock and facing her first deep sorrow, stood utterly confounded, as a child will stand who is lost in a crowd, having somehow let go of the hand that has
always guided. Thinking of her father, she realized how greatly she had leant on that man of deep kindness, how sure she had felt of his constant protection, how much she had taken that protection for granted. And so together with her constant grieving, with the ache for his presence that never left her, came the knowledge of what real loneliness felt like. She
would marvel, remembering how often in his lifetime she had thought herself lonely, when by stretching out a finger she could touch him, when by speaking she could hear his voice, when by raising her eyes she could see him before her. And now also she knew the desolation of small things, the power to give infinite pain that lies hidden in the little inanimate objects that persist, in a book, in a well-worn garment, in a half-finished letter, in a favourite armchair.
She thought: "They go on-- they mean nothing at all, and yet they go on," and the handling of them was anguish, and yet she must always touch them. "How queer, this old arm-chair has outlived him, an old chair--" And feeling the creases in its leather, the dent in its back where her father's head had lain, she would hate the inanimate thing for surviving, or perhaps she would love it and find herself weeping.
Morton [the house] had become a place of remembering that closed round her and held her in its grip of remembrance.
--From The Well of Loneliness (1928), by Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943).
Here is a contemporary review of the novel, which was banned and destroyed by legal order in 1929 because of its sympathetic treatment of lesbianism.
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