This isn’t the first time the book world has faced this ethical dilemma.
Sylvia Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, published her diaries years after her suicide. In those journals, Plath privately writes about her spiraling mental health and her longing to be understood in the conformist 1950s society that limited and ignored her. Over the past few years, Plath’s private, unabridged writings, in which she is deeply personal and raw, have become increasingly popular, and many consider her entries “relatable.” Some argue that, when studying Plath’s poetry and her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, her diaries serve as a resource to better understand her work. However, just because Plath incorporated her own experiences into her fictional work, does that automatically make the publication of her private writings ethical?
In contrast to Didion, Hemingway, and Plath, who left no direct instructions about what to do with the work they left behind, some writers did let their wishes be known — but were disobeyed. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, instructed his wife, Véra Nabokov, to burn his unfinished and unpublished writings after his death. Yet, many of these works, including letters, poems, and novels, were published in the 40 years following his death in 1977, including The Enchanter and The Original of Laura. The latter novel was published as a collection of fragments of an unfinished story written on index cards. His son, Dimitri Nabokov, who published and translated these novels, stated that he was conflicted between disobeying his father’s wishes and becoming a “literary arsonist.”
Nabokov’s son wasn’t the only person who had to choose between an author’s wish and literature as a whole. Franz Kafka owes a significant portion of his legacy to two novels published after his death and against his wishes. Kafka wrote to his close friend and editor, Max Brod, that “everything I leave behind me… in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Yet Brod published two of Kafka’s incomplete novels, The Castle and The Trial. These novels are now considered two of the greatest works of the 20th century, making it difficult to imagine a world in which Kafka’s dying wishes should have been respected.
But in certain cases, incomplete works published after a writer’s death end up harming their reputation, which adds another layer of moral complexity to the publication of posthumous fictional works.