Freedom to Read Week: Norman Levine Accuses Canadian Booksellers of Censorship

The Globe & Mail, 30 May 1959

A baffled reviewer:

Jean Swanson in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 20 December 1958

Freedom to Read Week: Irving Layton's Defence of Dog Show Girl and Deviate is Not Taken Seriously

The Globe & Mail, 17 April 1973

I began by attacking the puritanism and the anti-sexuality that was in this country then, and the philistinism and the materialism, and I still go on attacking those things which I find are defects in our body politic.

– Irving Layton, 1979

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn

Philip Alexius de Laszlo. Elinor Glyn (1912)

                                       Would you like to sin
                                       With Elinor Glyn
                                       On a tiger skin?
                                       Or would you prefer
                                       To err with her
                                       On some other fur? 

                                                        – Anonymous

The scandal of Three Weeks now a century past, is it not high time we take Elinor Glyn to our collective bosom as a daughter of Canada? I'm not suggesting that we confer some silly posthumous citizenship, rather that we recognize her parentage and upbringing.

In her day, our press all but ignored Mrs Glyn's Canadian roots; The Globe & Mail referred to her always as an "English novelist". This Editorial Note from the 25 November 1927 edition of the Financial Post is unusual:

Now, wasn't that uncalled for?

This film was playing in theatres across the country on the day that dig was published:

How very Canadian – flinging faeces at those who have done well – but I think there's more to this. A woman who moved to support her family when her alcoholic husband could not, Elinor Glyn was by turns a novelist, a journalist, a war correspondent, a screenwriter, a director and a producer. The staid, conservative Financial Post wouldn't have liked that, but her greater sin was that she wrote about sex and populated her stories with strong, confident women – women like herself.

I think she could take the criticism.

The Vancouver Sun, 28 October 1941

Postscript:

Above is the edition of Three Weeks that was seized by Toronto police back in 1911. Don't you prefer this?

Related post:

Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's

Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's

Or maybe not:

The Globe & Mail, 10 April 1910

I was familiar with Three Weeks – it was, after all, penned by scandalous semi-Canadian Elinor Glyn – but I have Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney to thank for bringing Cynthia in the Wilderness and The Yoke to my attention. Both products of the fertile mind of Hubert Wales, they'll soon be added to my library.

What sold me were these solid synopses found in David Trotter's The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge, 1993). Of Cynthia in the Wilderness, he writes:

Cynthia's husband, Harvey, revered her spirit and is consistently unfaithful to her body. She meets a man who appreciates both. They become lovers. However, the increasingly brutish Harvey catches them in the act and beats her lover over the head with a golf club. The lover survives. Meanwhile one of Cynthia's friends has self-sacrificingly poisoned Harvey and taken the rap. Cynthia returns from the Wilderness to marry her lover.

And of The Yoke, which Prof Trotter describes as "Racier still":

Angelica Jenour, still a virgin at forty, realizes that her twenty-year-old ward, Maurice, is awakening sexually, and fears that he will resort to prostitutes. One of Maurice's friends contracts venereal disease and commits suicide. Angelica decides that she will save Maurice from a similar fate, and herself from the "yoke" of repression by becoming his lover. After educating him in love, and in "racial health", she passes him on to his future wife.

Two years after the raid, Albert Britnell was convicted of knowingly selling indecent and obscene books. He was later acquitted. The appeal can be found online in Canadian Criminal Cases, vol. XX (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 1913).

The novels themselves are available gratis to all online, Torontonians included: Cynthia in the Wilderness, The Yoke, Three Weeks.

Meanwhile, Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney spin in their respective graves.

Albert Britnell, 241 Yonge Street, Toronto
Stationary & Office Products 1911
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