“First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?"

Another rip-roaring rejection arrived a year later through the letterbox of Virginia Woolf. After a lengthy demolition job on To The Lighthouse, David Balzer of Stanchion Press sought to assure her, “Do not, Mrs Woolf, confuse my objections with sex bias”. He snidely concluded, “Self-publication may be your best hope. If your own milieu is anything like that of your novel, I trust you will have little trouble making connections or garnering finances”.

On the subject of sex bias, perhaps the most hilarious of all was Bentley and Son’s rejection of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale? For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?”

- Rosemary Jenkinson, 'Good God, I can't publish this', The Critic, 20 June 2022