Outrages

`With precision and sensitivity, Naomi Wolf traces how the state came to police the private sphere; she brings into the light the lives of those whose resistance to this brutality was a beacon for the future...a remarkable, revelatory book' - Erica Wagner


The bestselling author of Vagina illuminates a dramatic history - how the Obsence Publications Act of 1857 led to a maelstrom, with reverberations lasting to our day.


At once, dissent and morality, deviancy and normalcy became modern legal concepts: if writers, editors, printers and booksellers did not uphold the law and the morals of society they faced serious repercussions.
Wolf portrays the ways this censorship played out - decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde - among a bohemian group of `sexual dissidents', including Walt Whitman in America and the English critic John Addington Symonds, who fell in love with Whitman's homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass. This was a dangerous love, even if only expressed on the page.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater and painter Simeon Solomon were among the artists whose lives were shadowed with jeopardy. But Wolf also reveals how, cleverly, they crafted their works to avoid the censor.
Outrages recounts how a dying Symonds helped to write the book on 'sexual inversion' that created our modern understanding of homosexuality, shining a light on his secret memoir: a half-hidden text that is rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the west, thus showing how the literature of love ultimately triumphs over censorship.