![]() “Having read a thousand pages of them, I was so taken with this person who just wanted to love in a state of truth,” Wolf says. In the sunny sitting room of her West Village apartment in New York – not precisely a place I’d have expected to find myself discussing, over coffee and doughnuts, the relationship of Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market to Victorian obscenity laws – Wolf leaps up and pulls from a nearby shelf a book so hefty she can barely hold it in one hand. If she does not turn him into a hero, exactly, she does all she can to make him seem complicatedly human: a freedom fighter, albeit a somewhat clenched one. The longer she researched him, the more she came to feel that, though he died in 1893, he was “just down the street” reading him in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, his “prescient voice seemed just a carrel away”. In her book’s introduction, she explains that she grew “increasingly fascinated with seeking out this elusive, tormented, world-changing character”. But Wolf, you gather, at some point fell for him quite hard. On the page, Symonds is not always wholly sympathetic, and there’s an obvious reason he’s all but forgotten now: the poetry is terrible. It's about one gay man, but it’s also about what happens when the secular state gets the power to enter your bedroomĪt its heart is a man called John Addington Symonds, an obscure writer who was an early advocate of male love, and whose work was either fudged – pronouns in his sonnets changed from male to female for publication – or locked away in iron boxes, so great was his fear that it would fall foul of the obscenity laws, or provide evidence in a possible prosecution of his sexual “crimes”. Highly serious and at times a little dusty, it could not be less personal if it tried. Outrages comes over as precisely what it is: a PhD thesis, reworked for a wider readership, which examines the effect of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and some other notable laws – the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, which authorised the forcible medical examination of homosexual men for signs of sexual activity the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which extended laws against sodomy to include acts of “gross indecency” between men whether committed in public or private – on the lives and work of various Victorian poets. Mostly, though, its author is entirely absent from its pages. Then again, having read her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, I also know that her declaration is perfectly true – for the time being, at least.Īt one point, admittedly, she does try to evoke what it feels like to hold a particular 19th-century manuscript in her hands (its almost furry pages give off, she fancies, the scent of a time when “people read and wrote by gaslight”). Readers will recall her last book, Vagina: A New Biography – in which she described the way that her then lover was able to give her orgasms so powerful they made the leaves on the trees outside her bedroom glow in Wizard of Oz Technicolor – and wonder if she is truly capable of giving up the over-sharing that has so often been her stock in trade. ![]() ![]() ![]() Such news is likely to be treated with a certain amount of scepticism in some quarters. ![]() When Naomi Wolf tells me that she’s finished with writing about herself – something she says more than once in the hour we spend together – it’s hard to know what to think. ![]()
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