© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press Calling for the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the August 19, 1928 edition of the Sunday Express, moralist-sensationalist James Douglas claimed that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” [1] This, of course, is not news. As Laura Doan has argued, the provocative “poison” passage has been quoted or misquoted in countless...