Leeds Cultural Conversations - The Trials of Oscar Wilde’s Salome: The Maud Allan Libel Case - Professor Ruth Robbins
Professor Ruth Robbins will deliver the talk at Carriageworks in Electric Press from 12.30pm-1.30pm on Wednesday 8 March. The event forms part of Leeds Cultural Conversations series programmed by the Centre for Culture and the Arts at Leeds Beckett. The lecture is free and open to all, but places must be reserved online here.
Entitled ‘The Trials of Oscar Wilde’s Salome: The Maud Allan Libel Case’, the lecture will detail the play’s difficult history.
Professor Robbins said: “The play was controversial and had been banned from public performance by the Lord Chancellor’s office in the 1890s. To get round the ban a private performance (at a private club) was put on by Allan and her company in 1918: not a good time to be doing Avant Garde art, in the final months before the Great War. It received one spectacularly hostile review by Tory MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, headlined ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’. Allan sued the writer for libel.
“My lecture will be about what happened next - the story of the trial and the attitudes which led to Pemberton-Billing’s acquittal, and why it still matters today.”
The trial raised questions about the persistent forms misogyny takes and offers some suggestions about images, resistance, and power.