I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a vial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.One dose of Ms Hall and it's eternal perdition, apparently.
Laura Doan's intelligent Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (Columbia University Press, 2001) features other expressions of Douglas' spleen, including denunciation of authors as -
Mimes, Cads, Bounders, Sniggerers, Innuendists, Pornocrats, Garbage Mongers, Purveyors of Pruriency, Vendors of Vice, Sewer Rats, Carrion Crows, Maggots of Decadence, Hookworks of Salacity, Literary Lepers and Yahoos.I do like the "Hookworks of Salacity", presumably residing just around the corner from the academic Tapeworms of Indolence and Nits of Ineptitude.
In another review Mr Douglas told an author that -
Vermin like you are expelled from the schools when they are detected, but you are not thrown out of our drawing rooms. You crawl everywhere and there is no insecticide with which to spray you ... You are the deadliest bacteria in our blood, but we have discovered no anti-toxin that prevents you from multiplying ... Not long ago I retched over a novel by a female procuress which explored abysmal horrors that hitherto have been the monopoly of psychoanalysis. Sweet girl graduates read it and discussed its esoteric abominations and fetid mysteries ... In every degenerate era of history parasites like you have appeared. You are the lice of decadence.
