Hall, already a successful poet and novelist, did not write The Well of Loneliness purely as an exercise in producing lesbian fiction; her prime objective was to popularize relatively new ideas and studies of human sexual interests and behaviors, and to promote the work of new sexologists like Richard von Kraft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis. Both believed that homosexuality was a trait that one was born with and that it was not alterable. They considered it a sexual inversion and as such termed homosexuals as "inverts". The work of the real-life psychologists iPs woven into the narrative; for example, Kraft-Ebbing's book Psychopathia Sexualis is the first that she finds in the secret book-case in her father's study after his death. The book states that homosexuality is common where there is a familial history of mental illness, which seems to be a rather negative statement; it also leads Stephen to see herself as someone ugly and damaged in a psychological and physical sense. It is also one of the parts of the book that drew the most criticism from the lesbian community, in that it was suggested that the book promoted shame among homosexual women, with its inference that homosexual children were only produced by those who had mental illnesses in their family. By contrast, psychoanalysts saw homosexuality as a form of arrested mental development in the homosexual person, and not something that was a result of their family's mental and emotional history.
Inversion suggests something that is standing on its head; in other words, gender inversion turns the accepted version of the genders upside down, creating a role reversal and producing an attraction to the same sex. Kraft-Ebbing determined that the soul of a female invert was masculine, which might be the first understanding of gender identity that was actually the result of any sort of academic study at all. There are passages in the book that seem to agree with this statement; for example, Stephen feels that she can identify other inverts in France whilst driving an ambulance because she can tell by their bearing, their gait and their general appearance.
The novel brought lesbianism to public attention even when the public was not ready to pay mind to it; Lord Birkenhead proposed a bill that would make lesbianism illegal because he felt that only one per cent of the female population had even heard of lesbianism, let alone been involved in a same-sex relationship. Banning the book only served to heighten the conversation - natural human instinct is to gravitate to anything that is banned, because it automatically seems more interesting. Hall herself believe that this was the first, and only, novel that was printed in exactly the way it had been written, because she wanted it to be a vehicle for the political inclusion of homosexual people in society and she also wanted it to be a statement of the normalcy of homosexuality.
