The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall — Read

During those long, anxious weeks in Cornwall, it was borne in on Stephen as never before how wide was the gulf between her and her mother, how completely they two must always stand divided. Yet looking at Anna's quiet ageing face, the girl would be struck afresh by its beauty, a beauty that seemed to have mollified the years, to have risen triumphant over time and grief. And now as in the days of her childhood, that beauty would fill her with a kind of wonder; so calm it was, so assured, so complete -- then her mother's deep eyes, blue like distant mountains, and now with that faraway look in their blueness, as though they were gazing into the distance. Stephen's heart would suddenly tighten a little; a sense of great loss would descend upon her, together with the sense of not fully understanding just what she had lost or why she had lost it -- she would stare at Anna as a thirsty traveller in the desert will stare at a mirage of water.

And one evening there came a preposterous impulse -- the impulse to confide in this woman within whose most gracious and perfect body her own anxious body had lain and quickened. She wanted to speak to that motherhood, to implore, nay, compel its understanding. To say: "Mother, I need you. I've lost my way -- give me your hand to hold in the darkness. " But good God, the folly, the madness of it! The base betrayal of such a confession! Angela delivered over, betrayed -- the unthinkable folly, the madness of it.