The following paper attempts a comparative study of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood to argue that lesbian desire rather than being suppressed, got legitimised by the acts of censorship in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. While my primary focus is the obscenity trial of Hall's text, I shall also delve into the literary aesthetic of Woolf and Barnes' texts to understand the ways in Modernism relied on encoding and self-censorship to speak about sexuality and gender.