Authors self-censoring to appease the Twitter mob is the new front in publishing’s culture war

The Instagram page of romance novelist Elin Hilderbrand is a jolly place. There are snaps from her book tours, in which she adopts the same pose over and over – arms above head, face creased into a open smile – and pictures of life amid the one percenters of wealthy Nantucket island off Cape Cod.

Nantucket is also the setting for many of her novels, which spin Jilly Cooper-esque tales of over-sexed blue-bloods getting frisky amid the clapboard mansions and fudge shops of costal New England. But this perfectly curated vision was disrupted recently as Hilderbrand took to social media to apologise for “insensitive” remarks about Anne Frank in her latest book, The Golden Girl.

Hilderbrand went on to explain that the offending passage would be immediately removed from e-editions of The Golden Girl and from future physical printings. She was cancelling her novel before her novel cancelled her.

“It was meant as hyperbole but was a poor choice, that was offensive and tasteless,” she wrote. To the happy aura emanating from her book tour snaps was added a cold dread.

Why would Hilderbrand make insensitive remarks about Anne Frank? Well, she hadn’t. Rather, she had put the comments in the mouth of one of her characters: a little rich girl who naively compares her circumstances to those of a victim the Holocaust.

The damning words are uttered in a flashback in which protagonist Vivi remembers her childhood and the time she decided she wanted to live in a friend’s attic. ‘You’re suggesting I hide here all summer?’ Vivi asks. ‘Like … like Anne Frank?’ They laugh. And then the narrator wonders if she is “off base”.

Did Hilderbrand go too far? The Internet says…yes! On social media readers denounced the joke – made by a child and then immediately regretted by said child – as “horrifically” anti-Semitic. Others were “gobsmacked in every way with the insensitivity” and accused Hilderbrand of thinking “antis-Semitism is funny”.

Startled and shaken by the criticism, Hilderbrand recanted immediately.

“Anne Frank was a courageous young woman whom I revere, and her story remains deeply influential in my life,” she wrote. “I always strive to write in good faith. Golden Girl is a novel I wrote for my children and I want them to be proud of every word.”

She also announced she was amending the text of The Golden Girl. Little Vivi would not longer share with the reader her forbidden thoughts about Anne Frank.

Anti-Semitism is (obviously) to be condemned. But was Hildebrand engaging in it or merely commenting on how deeply it is embedded in the WASP communities she gently skewers in her comedy-of-manners novels? The other question is whether there is ever any justification for censoring your characters – or re-writing books in order to appease the inevitable grumblers on Twitter?

There are echoes here of the final season of Game of Thrones. Fans demanded it be re-written and re-shot so as to better align with their view of how the series should play out.

Nor is Hildebrand’s vow to change the text an isolated incident in publishing. In 2019, author Casey McQuiston, who is non-binary, succumbed to internet apoplexy over a passage in the book Red, White and Royal Blue. In it, the President of the United States says, “Well, my UN ambassador f____d up his one job and said something idiotic about Israel, and now I have to call Netanyahu and personally apologise.”

The complaint was that the flippant remark “normalises genocide and war crimes done by Israel that will always be backed up and unashamedly supported by America”. Elsewhere, it was asserted that any discussion of Israel outside the context of genocide against Palestine was a moral failing on the part of the writer.

“Mentions of Israel (especially when they’re completely unnecessary as well, such as in books/films/shows) normalise the occupation of Palestine,” went on Instagram post. “All mentions, even ones that don’t outwardly seem bad, are wrong war crimes done by Israel that will always be backed up & unashamedly supported by America.”

As with Hildebrand, McQuiston bowed to the mob – if you can describe a few people on Instagram as a “mob” – and said that the “line will be changed for future printings”.

Twitter outrage and publishing have become a toxic mix. Genre writing – whether that be Hildebrand’s milieu of romance amongst the well-heeled, fantasy and science fiction, or “Young Adult” – has, in particular, been rocked by innumerable “scandals” in recent years. Consider Paris-born Chinese writer Amélie Wen Zhao, whose career was almost derailed in 2019 amid uproar over her depiction of slavery in a fantasy universe loosely modelled on the Far East.

Blood Heir was an allegory about the evils of human trafficking and indentured service in Asia. And it drew on Zhao’s experiences as a migrant and the powerlessness she felt as an Asian in America (hate crimes against Asian-Americans have spiralled recently). What hadn’t occurred to her was that American readers might view the book through a US-centric prism – and assume that injustices are precisely the same all over the world. And then the baying started.

“This book is about slavery, a false oppression narrative that equates having legitimately dangerous magical powers that kill people with being an oppressed minority, like a person of colour,” said a reader on Goodreads.

Stunned, Zhao apologised and announced her publisher would not be moving forward with Blood Heir. Her life in letters, just beginning, was over. “I was really caught off guard,” she told the New York Times. “It was very devastating to me that the book was read in a totally different cultural context.”

Zhao returned to her day job in finance and the fuss blew over. And then she re-read the book, to see if the charges of flippancy towards slavery stuck. She concluded this was not the case – and went ahead with publication. A sequel novel, Red Tigress, has just come out. Both books have drawn near-universal praise – with Zhao applauded, in particular, for confronting the evils of human trafficking.

There are two distinct issues here. One is the 15-minutes of outrage that has become an inevitable rite of passage for authors of every colour, creed and orientation, writing in almost every milieu (except for literary fiction – which continues to abide by its own rules of engagement). The second, more problematic one is writers rewinding history and retroactively censoring their work.

Twitter outage is everywhere now, so it is no surprise it should have infected publishing. More worrying, surely, is the idea novelists should take their cues from those who find offence in their work – even if the “offending” remarks are explicitly presented as from the perspective of (flawed) characters. Villains aren’t allowed to say villainous things.

That isn’t to suggest, of course, that authors are never wrong or that they shouldn’t make revisions when straying into prejudice. Charles Dickens took note when it was pointed out that his portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist leaned into what would today be described as anti-Semitic “tropes”.

He quickly changed course during the novel's serialisation. Fagin is referred to as “The Jew” 257 times in the novel’s first 38 chapters but barely at all in the 179 references to the character that follow. This was the correct thing to do – and spared Dickens a Twitter pile-on 180 years later.

Dated references have long been removed from old books so as to meet modern standards. Racial slurs were cut from Enid Blyton’s Noddy as far back as the Eighties, for instance, though Blyton’s snideness about the working class endures.

That’s quite distinct from the accusations levelled at Zhao and Hildebrand. They have been dragged before the inquisition by individuals determined to misunderstand what they are writing about and to attribute bad faith where none exists.

Not that they can be blamed for trying to placate their critics. As anyone who has found themselves at the centre of a “cancel storm” will attest, it is hugely unsettling when the mob turns on you and demands your head. Yet these storms are quick to blow themselves out. Once the swarm have received their dopamine hit – all they’re really after anyway – they move on to the next target.

In that moment of calm Zhao reflected that she had been correct after all. Perhaps Hilderbrand, as silence descends and her Instagram page once more becomes a homage to nattering in Nantucket, will likewise begin to regret her haste in bowing to the bullies.