Fortunately for Hall, the book did get published in the U. S.  Hall's first American publisher, Knopf, backed out for fear of an obscenity charge but a second, smaller house accepted the book. Just as Knopf had predicted, authorities charged the publisher with obscenity as soon as The Well appeared in print.  In a New York court, the presiding judge ruled that the book "tends to debauch public morals," and found the publisher guilty, but on appeal, the charge was dismissed.  In spite of the efforts to suppress the book, or perhaps because of the publicity the court cases generated, The Well sold over 1,000,000 copies during Hall's lifetime and has been translated into at least eleven languages.  

The book tells the story of a girl born to a wealthy English family who is nicknamed Stephen because of her boyish ways.  As she grows older, she remains a tomboy and her father, Sir Phillip, becomes so concerned that he reads Karl Ulrichs and Richard von Krafft-Ebing where he discovers that Stephen is an invert.  Out of pity for his beloved Stephen, Sir Phillip never tells her the terrible truth.  After Sir Phillip's untimely death, Stephen pursues an interest in writing that her father had encouraged and becomes a successful novelist.  She falls in love with Mary, a younger woman, and the two live together harmoniously in Paris where they go to the bars and cabarets frequented by male and female inverts.  The people they see there lead lives of despair, and find only momentary relief in doses of creme de menthe or cocaine.  Stephen loves Mary so much that she feels guilty for leading her lover into the tragic life that is the only possibility for an invert in a hostile, unaccepting society.  Ultimately, she resolves to kill herself so that Mary can be freed from her love for Stephen and pursue a more rewarding life as the wife of a mutual friend.  The last paragraph of the book ends in Stephen's dying prayer:  "... Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole World.  Give us also a right to our existence."

When the book was first published, it elicited many different responses, and it still does.  Many lesbians in the 1930's, '40s, and '50s encountered their first exposure to other lesbians in the book's pages, and found the book liberating, but some gays and lesbians were offended by the book's apologetic tone and pleas for pity.  Henry Gerber hated it so much that he called it "ideal anti-homosexual propaganda."

Perhaps the most serious charge leveled against Hall is that she invented a literary form in which both male and female homosexuals are depicted as tragic, suicide prone and alcoholic.  Hall had created these depictions to highlight the terrible effects of social opprobrium on inverts, but when her imitators in  American movies and pulp novels borrowed the theme of homosexual tragedy, they usually neglected the social criticism.