Missing what?

She said she wouldn’t read Hemingway, because of his treatment of women.

‘Okay,’ I said, and recommended some other writers. I’m no Hemmingway expert, I just like the way he wrote, and we were in a general writing class, so it was not a good time to begin a discussion about the attitude of an author that many of us were not familiar with.  I had plenty of other suggestions to provide so we moved on.

I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot since though.  I did once put a novel on the fire rather than pass it on, because it ended with the heroine falling in love with the man who had abducted and raped her.  That was a couple of decades ago, but I can remember the feeling of satisfaction as I stirred up the charring pages with the poker.  Books, I thought, were a kind of model that showed people how to think and act.  I think I even went so far as to begin a letter to the publisher.

But yesterday, when I recommended Hemingway’s short stories to a group, I found myself qualifying the suggestion.  ‘He was a writer of his time,’ I said.  ‘You may not always like the way he portrays women.’

I didn’t feel it necessary to caution a reading group about text content when we read ‘Tom Jones’, or ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’.  I don’t issue a warning alongside Katherine Mansfield, though some of her characters and situations are just as questionable as Hemingway’s when measured against today’s ideas on roles and expectations.

There are books I have chosen not to read, and others I wish I hadn’t, but I’ve not been tempted to burn any of them. My favourite copy of Wuthering Heights is held together with a large elastic band.  I have a new copy, but cannot bring myself to lose that old one.  You might see that as sentimental attachment, and I would agree that’s a small part.

What I would ask though, is, ‘Should I have burned that book?’