AustLit

'With a few of his Bloomsbury friends, Stephensen compiled a pamphlet ridiculing Douglas [editor of the Sunday Express] and the suppression of The Well of Loneliness. Entitled The Sink of Solitude, the pamphlet was said to have caused Radclyffe Hall 'considerable pain', no doubt because in his preface Stephensen dismissed the novel as silly and feeble, 'either as a work of art or as a moral argument'. Stephensen's own prejudices and polemical skills enabled him to pour even more scorn on Douglas by depreciating the whole incident as 'trivial and vulgar', involving 'pathetic post-war lesbians' and the 'sentimental scietificality of psychopaths like Havelock Ellis...The pamphlet was issued as from 'Hermes Press' at 34 Bloomsbury Street, and according to Jack Lindsay the lampoon was mostly Stephensen's work.' (Craig Munro Wild Man of Letters: a Story of P. R. Stephensen (1984): 69).