Mask of Apollo and "Restricted Books"

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

I think I've asked this before and nobody came up with any suggestions, but I'm doing another edit and thought I'd try again.

Nicola gets in trouble at some point because she takes this Mary Renault novel to school with her and not only is it an extra book, and (I think) from the local library, but in the Kingscote library it's Restricted or Limited or whatever the term is.  We've talked before about her take on why it should have been Restricted; and I am sad to think that it would probably still be the equivalent of Restricted in many American school libraries today.

My question was:  what other books would have been restricted in an English girls' school?  Books that would have been deemed suitable for the Seniors but not for the Juniors?  I need something written before 1938, something that might have appealed to an adventurous 12-year-old.  I need this for my own children's book, and it's the kind of thing that's impossible for a 20-year-old American RA to figure out!  I thought that somebody here might have an idea, though.

Comments

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Well of Loneliness would have been banned, not restricted. I read somewhere a reference saying that it was all the rage among male undergraduates at some Oxford college in the late 1930s and I do intend a reference to it in my next book, but not from anywhere near the school library!

[liadnan]

It wouldn't have been available at all save for copies illegally imported from France (which is presumably where any copies circulating in Oxford would have come from unless they were copies that had been bought and retained from the small circulation that escaped into the wild in 1928). It wasn't available in the UK, after the 1928 trial ordered it to be destroyed, until 1949 and as late as 1946 when the Home Secretary was asked if he would permit a new edition the reply was that any publisher would risk prosecution.