Naomi Wolf responds to continued criticism of her delayed book.
After her book Outrages was indefinitely delayed by its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, over factual mistakes, Naomi Wolf is moving forward on damage control while responding sharply to some critics.
In a May interview with the BBC’s Matthew Sweet, Wolf discovered she had misinterpreted the term “death recorded,” which provided a basis for some of the analysis in Outrages. After initially announcing the error would be corrected in future printings, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said it would delay publication.
Outrages has already been published by the London-based press Virago, and Wolf has said she is committed to correcting the book and publishing it in the US. In the meantime, she has questioned some critics, including on Twitter, where accounts associated with her husband’s firm referred to the “obviously false claims & opportunism” behind criticism of the book. (Wolf later told the Times the tweets “should not have happened.”)
The New York Times also reported a dust-up with a scholarly website:
After the website Public Seminar published a critical review by Emily Rutherford, a graduate student in history at Columbia who has done extensive research on Symonds, Ms. Wolf sent the site’s editor a strongly worded email attacking the review’s “serious and even indefensible errors,” and demanding it be taken down until it was “fully corrected.” (The site made one correction, and has also published an article by a defender of Ms. Wolf, with a response from Ms. Wolf herself to come.)
Read more of the Times’ reporting.
