author
Mary Casal
1864–1935
Best known as the pen name behind The Stone Wall, this American writer left an unusually candid life story that now holds an important place in LGBTQ literary history. Writing from the perspective of a woman born just after the Civil War, she captured both private struggle and quiet resilience.
1 Audiobook
The stone wall : An autobiography
by Mary Casal
About the author
Mary Casal was the pen name of Ruth Fuller Field (June 17, 1864 – February 22, 1935), an American writer from Deerfield, Massachusetts. She is remembered above all for The Stone Wall, published in 1930, a memoir that is widely described as the first known autobiography by a lesbian woman published in the United States.
What makes her work stand out is its honesty. In The Stone Wall, she wrote about a life shaped by secrecy, social pressure, and same-sex love at a time when such subjects were rarely discussed in print. That openness has made the book valuable not only as literature, but also as a personal record of queer life in America.
Today, Mary Casal's name is often presented alongside Ruth Fuller Field's, since the pseudonym concealed a real life that later readers and historians have worked to recover. Her writing endures because it speaks plainly, personally, and bravely across more than a century.