Outrages: Naomi Wolf and Erica Wagner

In 1991, following the publication of her controversial bestseller The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf became an international celebrity, and the leading light of what was to become the third wave of feminism. Her latest book Outrages, based on her doctoral research at Oxford University, explores the pervasive, still continuing and sometimes surprising repercussions of The Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Swinburne, Walter Pater, the Rossettis and Oscar Wilde all feature in a gripping analysis of how the state sought to exercise surveillance over the printed word, and of how artists and writers sought, ingeniously if not always successfully, to evade that surveillance.

For the first event of her UK tour, and her only London event, Wolf will be in conversation with the literary journalist Erica Wagner, who has written of Outrages ‘With precision and sensitivity, Naomi Wolf traces how the state came to police the private sphere; she brings into the light the lives of those whose resistance to this brutality was a beacon for the future. It is a remarkable, revelatory book’.