William Golding 'Lord of The Flies' Author Attempted Rape

by candice.tsuei | August 17, 2009 at 11:57 am

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William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, admitted in private papers that he had tried to rape a 15-year-old girl during his teenage years.

Golding writes that they went for a walk to the common and he “felt sure she wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and desirable mouth.”Soon they were “wrestling like enemies” as he “tried unhandily to rape her”. But she resisted and Golding, all those years later, wrote that “he had made such a bad hand at rape” before shaking her and shouting “I’m not going to hurt you”. Dora ran off.

The writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983, recalled the rape attempt in an unpublished memoir he wrote for for his wife, Ann, to explain his "monstrous" character. The memoir is titled Men, Women & Now.

The account of the incident was revealed by John Carey, a literary critic and an emeritus professor of English Literature at Oxford, who had granted access to Golding's personal journals and an unpublished memoir that once kept carefully and personally by Golding for 20 years.

Prof Carey, who has used his access to the papers to pen a new biography of Golding, said Golding "was aware of and repelled by the cruelty in himself and was given to saying that, had he been born in Hitler's Germany, he would have been a Nazi. Dora seems to have played her part in this self-knowledge."