During the interview on Thursday to discuss “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love,” a historical examination of same-sex relations in the Victorian era and the ways in which they were criminalized, she told the BBC Radio host, Matthew Sweet, that she found “several dozen executions” of men accused of having sex with other men.
“Several dozen executions?” he asked, later adding: “I don’t think you’re right about this.”
Sweet said that was a mistake based on a misunderstanding of the legal term “death recorded.”
“It doesn’t mean that he was executed. It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon,” Sweet said. "I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”
After a pause, Wolf said, “Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.”
A prominent author who has written several works of feminist and cultural criticism, Wolf is known for books such as “The Beauty Myth” and “Vagina: A New Biography.”
A spokeswoman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is publishing “Outrages” in the United States, referred to the issue as an “unfortunate error” but said, “we believe the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds.”
She added that while the publisher “employs professional editors, copy editors and proofreaders for each book project, we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking.”
Wolf did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Twitter, however, she said she is correcting parts of her book as a result of the discussion. And she and Sweet inadvertently offered a lesson on how to gracefully handle these sorts of situations on social media. Sweet explained the errors in Wolf’s book in a lengthy Twitter thread, while Wolf thanked him for calling her attention to the misunderstanding.
“My thanks to you is substantial,” she said in one tweet, adding that these records “deserve to be pored over.”