-
Women and fiction : feminism and the novel, 1880-1920 First published in 1979, this academic monograph was reissued as a Methuen University Paperback in 1981. Somewhat enigmatically referred to in Gay’s The Word’s list of seized books as ‘Women fiction’, it is one of the more unexpected items to be confiscated by Customs, who seized four copies in October 1984. Patricia Stubbs discusses the relationship between literary depictions of women and the roles and possibilities available to them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the copy on display here demonstrates, the book was also available in academic libraries. This is Senate House Library’s own copy and has been heavily marked up by studious readers.
-
Women and madness Since publication in 1972, this feminist work on women’s psychology has sold over 2.5 million copies. Psychologist Phyllis Chesler (1940-) interviewed women who had been psychiatry or psychotherapy patients and wove their experiences into a book which explores the ways in which women are stigmatised, abused and oppressed by a patriarchal medical establishment. The book is held in multiple UK academic libraries. It is unclear which edition of the book was seized during ‘Operation Tiger’ – the Allen Lane edition is shown here – but more likely it was the 1973 version from the US mass market publisher Avon Books. Chesler sued the owners of Avon for publishing the book with differences from her original text.
-
You are the rain : a novel When a hurricane strikes an all-girl canoe trip in the Florida Everglades, athletic Crash and introvert June become separated from the group and must depend on each other to survive. The novel is described as being “Of lesbian interest” in the 1975-76 catalogue of women’s bookstore First Things First, although the relationship is implied rather than overt. The novel is endorsed on the back cover by lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, with several references to the poetry of Emily Dickinson throughout. The title is taken from a May Swenson poem – “I will be earth you be the flower / You have found my root you are the rain”. Swenson and R.R. Knudson (1932-2008) were lovers in the mid-1960s. They collaborated on the collection ‘American Sports Poems’ (1988), and Knudson was Swenson’s literary executor on her death in 1989.
