![]() ![]() William Morrow and Company, Renault’s U.S. ![]() That’s what had happened to Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which was banned from publication for years. Laws dating back to the 1850s held that books likely to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” were obscene and could be destroyed. Sexual acts between men were still illegal in Britain. The publisher may have been right to worry. Longmans believed readers who ran out to buy Renault’s new book, expecting another heterosexual melodrama, “would be in for a shock,” Sweetman writes. It would be, as David Sweetman writes in Mary Renault: A Biography, “the first openly novel by a serious writer to be published in Britain” since World War II. It was a striking departure from her earlier romances between doctors and nurses. Mary Renault, the author of four modestly successful novels with Longmans, Green & Co., had turned in the manuscript of her fifth and most daring book yet in autumn 1952. The response from her publisher was not promising. ![]()
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