Page "The Well of Loneliness" Paragraph 10

Stephen moves to London and writes a well-received first novel.

Her second novel is less successful, and her friend the playwright Jonathan Brockett, himself an invert, urges her to travel to Paris to improve her writing through a fuller experience of life.

There she makes her first, brief contact with urban invert culture, meeting the lesbian salon hostess Valérie Seymour.

During World War I she joins an ambulance unit, eventually serving at the front and earning the Croix de Guerre.

She falls in love with a younger fellow driver, Mary Llewellyn, who comes to live with her after the war ends.

They are happy at first, but Mary becomes lonely when Stephen returns to writing.

Rejected by polite society, Mary throws herself into Parisian gay nightlife.

Stephen believes Mary is becoming hardened and embittered and feels powerless to provide her with " a more complete and normal existence ".