A LADY NOVELIST

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16547, 22 November 1915, Page 6

A LADY NOVELIST

CREATES A SENSATION,

TAKES POISON IN COURT.

Piess Association —By telegraph—Copyright, LONDON, November 19. Miss Annesley Kenealy took action against Messrs W. H. Smith and Son, newsagents, for placing, her novel on their library black list, thus characterising it as immoraJ. Judgment was given against her, and she created a sensation by taking poison in court and having to be removed in an unconscious condition. Miss Kenealy, who is a handsome ■woman, conducted her own case. She ■wore a small cap and a. loose-fitting robe modelled on Portia's style. She delivered an impassioned speech, defending the morality of her novels against the "poodle" woman who said l : "Thus saith Mrs Grundy." When Mr Justice Coleridge ruled that she had no case, she stood up in court and drank a small bottle of milky fluid, then shrieked' : My Lord, I told you you were trying a woman for her life. I have taken enough poison to kill five people.'' She then collapsed. There was some confusion v in court, where it was recalled how that worldfamous company-promoting rascal Whitaker Wright had similarly poisoned himself in 1904. The doctors carried-her into the waiting room, and she recovered consciousness in half an hour, when she was taken to the hospital. In January of 1910 Miss Kenealy failed 1 in an action against the Northcliffe press for wrongful dismissal. A month later she went to Carmelite House and asked to see Lord Northcliffe. Later she was found in a waiting room in a semi-con-scious state. She was then taken to a hospital, where she recovered rapidly.