'Sobering and timely' Peter Parker, The Literary Review
The bestselling author explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer's refusal to stay silenced. Outrages brings us the story of the English poet and memoirist John Addington Symonds, and shows how a law created in the mid-1800s led to reverberations lasting to our day.
The Obscene Publication Act of 1857 effectively defined dissent and morality, deviancy and normalcy and if writers, editors, printers and booksellers did not uphold the conventional morals of society they faced serious repercussions.
Wolf depicts the ways this censorship played out, decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde, among a bohemian group of 'sexual dissidents', including Swinburne, Dante and Christina Rossetti - and Walt Whitman in America - and in particular, John Addington Symonds, who fell in love with Whitman's homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass.
Outrages shines a brilliant light on Symonds' secret memoir and the essay of his that is understood to be one of the first gay rights manifestos in the west. John Addington Symonds believed, hoped and wrote about a future freedom to love, speak and write without fear.
'[A] long-overdue literary investigation into censorship and the life of a tormented trailblazer, a prescient father of the modern gay rights movement' Oprah Magazine
'Remarkable and moving' Larry Kramer, author of Faggots and The Normal Heart

Naomi Wolf conpleted a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford in 2015. She taught Victorian Studies as a Visiting Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, received a Barnard College Research Fellowship at the Center for Women and Gender, was recipient of a Rothermere American Institute Research Fellowship for her work on John Addington Symonds at the University of Oxford, and taught advocacy literature at George Washington University as a visiting lecturer. She's lectured widely on the themes in Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love, presenting lectures on Symonds and the themes in Outrages at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, at Balliol College, Oxford, and to the undergraduates in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. She lectured about Symonds and Outrages for the first LGBTQ Colloquium at Rhodes House. Dr Wolf was a Rhodes Scholar and a Yale graduate. She's written eight non-fiction bestsellers about women's issues and civil liberties, and is the CEO of DailyClout.io, a news site and legislative database in which US state and Federal legislation is shared digitally and read and explained weekly. She holds an honorary degree from Sweet Briar College. She and her family live in New York City.