Lesbian novel features in archive

The Well of Loneliness was written by Radclyffe Hall

Scotland's first women's archive, including family planning leaflets, suffragette photos and one of the first known lesbian novels, is to be set up.

A £410,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund will help fund the scheme.

The money will be used to catalogue 500 boxes of material representing 100 years of women's social history in Scotland.

The archive, containing some 30,000 documents and publications, will be housed at Glasgow's Mitchell Library.

A rare edition of the lesbian novel "Well of Loneliness" by Radclyffe Hall will be included in the collection.

By today's standards it contains nothing explicit but its defence of homosexuality in 1928 was enough to merit a complete ban and a subsequent obscenity trial.

The Lottery grant will also help to fund an archivist who will catalogue the collection and train volunteers to preserve it for future generations.