Celia Marshik argues that censorship can benefit as well as harm writers and the works they create in response to it.

Celia Marshik is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Introduction: the ethics of indecency; 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the censorship dialectic; 2. Bernard Shaw's defensive laughter; 3. Virginia Woolf and the gender censorship; 4. James Joyce and the necessary scandal of art; 5. Jean Rhys and the downward path; Afterword: forgotten evils; Notes; Bibliography; Index.