The Ethics of Dealing With an Author’s Legacy

07 May, 2026

In the defense of deceased authors, whose name and works are used to support postmodern ideologies.

Introduction

Recently, I was listening to an interview given by Hermione Lee in 2014, in which she was talking about Penelope Fitzgerald’s life and the process of writing her biography. After being questioned if she knew Penelope on a personal level, she answered that although they had met, they were not very close. If she had knew, though, that she would eventually be the author of her biography, she would have tried to ask her more personal questions, and try to dive into her intimate life. However, Penelope, being apparently really private and evasive, and avoiding spreading information about confidential issues, would have made this process quite difficult anyway. Hermione specifically stated "That’s very different from writing about Edith Wharton, Willa Cather or Virginia Woolf, where they were all safely dead."

According to Hermione Lee, when Penelope was interviewed in the later years of her life, there were things that she would never talk about, such as her abusive marriage, her once poor financial state and more. As the biographer mentioned this, I naturally asked myself "Then how come we know about that stuff now?". If Penelope sought to keep this information private—which she totally had the right to do, since everyone has a right to privacy, no matter if they are well-known or not—why was it revealed once she passed away?

Whilst I do not think there is any sort of evil hidden behind a biographer’s intentions, where the lines commence and finish should be strictly reconsidered, especially when it comes to privacy and the usage of an author's life or words. If we look beyond, we could say that the way literary criticism is currently done should also be redefined, when "fresh" interpretations that serve specific purposes are given to texts written two, three, or several centuries ago, without the authors' approval.

Writers are not products. Even though the marketization of literature has drastically increased, alongside the alteration of language, there is an enormous ethical aspect concerning the authors' privacy and the way their works and personal beliefs are used. At the same time, there is also a great responsibility when speaking on people's behalf, particularly on the behalf of those who are no longer with us. I will not hide that I felt highly concerned listening to the interview mentioned above. It saddened me hearing that part of Penelope’s life was revealed to the public, despite her being opposed to share it, while still alive. It is obvious that deceased people cannot defend themselves any longer and that makes the issue a thousand times worse. Once again, if we look further than that, we will recognize that nowadays it has been normalized to use classic authors to support postmodern ideas and ideologies as a point-strengthener—an act that turns out to be disrespectful and vulgar.

Deconstruction in literature

During the 60s Jacques Derrida developed an abstract philosophical idea called "deconstruction": a process according to which one rearticulates a text, trying to find hidden or alternative meanings. Specifically:

"It consists in digging out things the text doesn't know it's saying, but also 'ways in which it fails to make the points it seems to be trying to make.' To Derrida, an author always means more than and something different from that he indicates through his writing. Therefore, 'the textuality of a text cannot be locked into one single interpretation. A text always has cracks and fissures by which it is unavoidably exposed to the outside; it is open to another reader, to ever changing interpretations.'"¹

Until today, the Derridean method has been used in different disciplines, challenging traditional views and remodeling certain perspectives—literature being, of course, among these fields.

However, Derrida’s idea holds a great danger: that of deforming reality, or better said, neglecting it. While the nature of reality and how it is defined has nowadays been turned into a conceptual topic that happens to be constantly reconsidered, it seems to me a very simple matter. There are already several fixed foundations that serve as starting points, from where people are able to exist and, then, to examine various topics—as it has been the case for centuries. The harm in the deconstruction theory lies in the questioning of the inevitable, of the pure truth that cannot be modified, even if we try to do so on a theoretical level. For theory and practice must go hand in hand, at least up until a certain point—if not, the deviation from reality is unavoidable, creating a chaos, in which people feel lost, unguided and insecure in the longer term.

This theory, when applied to literature, evidently twists an author's words, intentions and reputation, turning a piece of work into something that, in reality, is not:

"Cultural critics in literature have discovered in the deconstruction’s school of thought a method of attack on the traditional interpretations of literary works. They use deconstructionist thinking to remove the traditional meaning from the literary works and replace it with a new one."²

Deconstruction, as the word itself reveals, is not found in the creation of something new, but in the alteration of something that already exists—and exactly there lies the most importance difference. One could think that it is easier to criticize, condemn or manipulate a piece of work that has been carefully crafted and, indeed, appreciated by people universally, than producing something from scratch, using new methods and techniques to convey innovative ideas, if this is so much needed. In the end, one could think so, probably because it is so.

The death of the author

During the 20th century, an additional ideology aroused, according to which the literary work is independent of its creator.

"Within modernist aesthetics and New Criticism it became a virtual heresy to trace the novel to its author, the cantata to its composer, the sculpture to its sculptor. The work was to be judged in terms of its internal coherence rather than the external motivations for its creation or its subsequent social, political or ethical effects: once woven, the web has no need for a spider."³

This was expressed through an essay by Roland Barthes (La mort de l'auteur) in the late 60s, which supported the absolute detachment between an author and his work, including the reader’s prerogative to read a book without taking into consideration who wrote it.

"In 'The Death of the Author', Barthes argues that we should stop seeing the 'real person' who wrote a book as important. He suggests that we ought not to interpret a book by referring to the author’s biography. What an author believed (or is said to have believed) is not important to the understanding of his or her book."⁴
"Readers must thus, according to Barthes, separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot."⁵

Well, my answer would be to just read what an author has written. Is not that enough to detect what he intended to convey?

Now, this kind of statement, besides seeming pretty baseless—since it is obvious that a specific work would have been different if created by someone else, thus it is, indeed, important who writes what—holds a danger that revolves around the usage of texts to support points that their authors might not have agreed with in the first place. Once again, we face the same major problem: the fact that some authors are literally dead!

Logically speaking, a text cannot fully stand alone: firstly, because it would not even exist if someone had not written it, and secondly, because it is affected by the author’s filters: morals, ideas, values, etc. Consequently, when an author writes, he puts on the paper parts of himself because it just cannot happen any other way. One thing is if someone ignores who the author of a work is, but reinforcing the idea that a reader's experience of understanding and interpreting a text is more enriched by eliminating the "tyrannical" aspect of acknowledging its creator sounds to me absurd and perfectly unfair.

Meanwhile, another danger that lies in the theory mentioned above is that of integrity. The idea of an author not being connected to his work could be perceived and used as a quite comfortable justification for a writer that wishes to avoid taking any responsibility. Yet, an author is, more or less, responsible for what he writes, in the same way every single person is, more or less, responsible for his actions. Writing is a risk, just as expressing oneself publicly, or anything else in life. Hiding behind unreasonable and intangible theories does not serve anyone but those whose words lack substance.

The role of interpretation in literature

As I have stated in a previous post, reader-response criticism describes the phenomenon when a reader interprets a story according to his personal life experiences. This happens because reading is an act of engagement—it is intellectual, emotional and personal. Therefore, it is practically impossible to read with complete detachment.

There are books that can offer multiple connotations and readers might understand their stories in different ways. However, there are also works that do not hide any other meaning apart from the original one. For instance, in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, readers often perceive it in an allegorical way, trying to give double meanings to the things described. In a letter, though, Hemingway rejected any interpretations of this kind, stating that the story was meant to be straightforward rather than symbolic. The same has happened with Ishiguro's book The Buried Giant, where he explained that the story was not an allegory, despite people believing the opposite. These are examples in which authors were still alive in order to clarify misinterpretations. But—since life is not eternal and we all eventually vanish—when this happens with authors that have passed away, there is, unfortunately, no one to clarify things out—only written evidence, if saved and shared.

That said, we could agree on the fact that literary interpretation has the possibility to expand as a serving tool, and does so, especially in the academic field but also outside of it, where narrative is mixed on purpose with activism and even serves as reinforcement to propaganda. As this happens, we move from the subjective area of understanding a text to the collective, where responsibility is higher and influence plays a crucial role.

When was it decided that an author would have to "sell his name" for it to be used as a device to support postmodern ideologies?

Final thoughts

Heritage, reputation, or privacy are all, undoubtedly, of great importance. To me, the way an author's legacy is handled is as equally important as his rights. In the meantime, I find curious the fact that, while copyright laws protect an author's works from being copied, there is no defined law (at least that I am aware of) that protects a deceased author from being used to support ideological purposes, since this act belongs to the context of free speech. On top of that, once the copyright expires and a writer's work enters the public domain, anyone can use, adapt, distribute, manipulate, or reinterpret it for any purpose...

Nevertheless, I would like to trust that, even if there is no legislation that provides such kind of protection, we can still remember that writers are, and were once, humans. The fact that people are deceased does not give one the right to expose them, use their public image, or speak freely on their behalf, without first making sure that this is the proper thing to do or the accurate information to spread.

Note: No AI was used to write this post. Only my partner's valuable help to spot little mistakes.