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

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I disagree: there is a plain and obvious significance to the title which has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone's sexuality, namely that it is a play upon the words "Natural Death" or, strictly, "Death by Natural Causes". These are formal coroner's court verdicts, and, as such go back to the time in English law "whereof the memory of man runneth naught to the contrary."

The phrase is also used in the case of R v. Price (1884) [which as the leading case on what it was legal to do with a dead body I am absolutely certain DLS would have been aware of, particularly as it was key to the legalisation of cremation, which was Miss Dawson's preferred means of having her remains dealt with] where "unnatural" was interpreted as "a reasonable suspicion that there may have been something peculiar about the death, that it may have been due to other causes than common illness".

What the Doctor got into trouble for was voicing precisely that suspicion about Agatha Dawson's death, and the whole book surrounds the difficulty not of proving whodunnit - there is never a question about who the villain is - but that a crime has been committed at all. It was rather daring at the time to write a "howdunnit" where the identity of the murderer was in plain sight from the very beginning.