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NEW YORK — Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has cancelled publication of a book by American author Naomi Wolf on gay persecution in 19th century Britain, the U.S. company said, after the work was exposed for several errors.

The publisher and author “have mutually and amicably agreed to part company,” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) said in an email on Thursday.

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Wolf’s book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love aimed to examine Britain’s Victorian laws which punished men with execution for having sex with other men.

Wolf wrote about men sentenced to death by London’s Old Bailey court in the 1850s for sodomy, even though the last recorded hanging for gay sex in Britain was in 1835.

“HMH will not be publishing Outrages,” a company spokeswoman said in an email without elaboration.

Wolf’s contention that “several dozen” men were executed in the 19th century was challenged in May by a British historian who said Wolf misinterpreted the phrase “death recorded” as execution, when in fact it meant the accused were spared.