NEW YORK, June 15 — The US publisher of feminist author Naomi Wolf’s latest book Outrages, about the persecution of gay men in 19th century Britain, has delayed its release amid questions about her research.
The book has already been released in Britain, and was expected to hit US bookshelves on Tuesday.
But one of her main points—that dozens of men were executed for their homosexuality in the 1850s—appears to be incorrect, possibly because she misunderstood the court documents she reviewed.
A BBC interviewer called her out on air over the apparent mistakes, and Wolf says she “made necessary changes immediately” to her manuscript.
But Houghton Mifflin Harcourt nevertheless delayed the publication.
“As we have been working with Naomi Wolf to make corrections to Outrages, new questions have arisen that require more time to explore,” the publisher said in a statement sent Friday to AFP.
“We are postponing publication and requesting that all copies be returned from retail accounts while we work to resolve those questions,” it said, without offering a new publication date.
Wolf said on Twitter that she “strongly objected” to the decision.
“The heart of my book is not criminology but censorship,” she wrote.
The book’s subtitle is Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love.
Amazon now says the book will be available on June 1, 2020.
Wolf, 56, first came to prominence in the early 1990s with The Beauty Myth. Her 2012 book Vagina: A New Biography also earned a lot of attention. — AFP
