Augustus Gloop is no longer fat. Miss Trunchbull’s face is not “horsey”, no children in Matilda are “delinquents” or “idiots” and Bunce is no longer a “dwarf”.
A couple of months ago, Puffin announced that it had decided to overhaul Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books in order to make them more palatable to a modern readership. It did not go down well. Salman Rushdie said that “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed”. Rishi Sunak’s official spokesman said that the prime minister, to quote Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, thinks that we shouldn’t “gobblefunk around” with literary heritage. In fact, almost nobody other than the people who made them seemed to think that these changes were a good idea.
The incident became a referendum on the process that led to the changes: something called sensitivity reading. This is not the first time the practice has caused controversy. The poet Kate Clanchy, unhappy with the extensive changes that sensitivity readers suggested she make to the manuscript of her non-fiction book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, parted ways with Picador and published the book with Swift instead last year.
Sensitivity reading has been couched in terms of censorship, shouted down as a sign of the degradation of culture and an attack on a writer’s right to free speech. As a writer who published their first novel this year, I have been through the editorial process that accompanies publication, and something about the debate sounded a bit, well, off. Were there really people who were allowed to come in and force changes on a novel? I didn’t come across any. So what actually happens when a sensitivity read is done?
Sensitivity reading entered publishing relatively recently, in the past decade or so. But it has been around longer in video games and tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, which is where many sensitivity readers started working, doing things like making sure the fantasy world is not accidentally a very white fantasy world. Since the early 2010s, the industry has grown, first in the US and then elsewhere, and become something of a hot-potato topic among people who comment on goings-on in the books world.
“It’s so much less exciting when you find out that we’re not a secretive cabal,” Erin Servais joked at the beginning of our call a couple of weeks ago. She’s a sensitivity reader and writer based in Minneapolis, who’s been doing this work for a few years, and runs an agency for these readers called Dot & Dash. She’s been an avid reader all her life and used to be a journalist. Lately, she’s been particularly drawn to memoirs, and fiction that plays with short paragraphs as a form, like Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour.
I asked her to talk me through what the process looks like. It’s relatively simple. An author or an editor will come to her with a manuscript for a novel. They’ll tell her what topics they’d like it to be “read for”, to see if there are changes that could be made to improve the book’s handling of that topic: maybe it’s a depiction of a particular ethnic group or sexuality, or an experience like sexual assault. Then, she works out who in her stable of readers is best suited to the task at hand and negotiates a fee. The reader then reads the book and goes back to the publisher or the author with detailed notes on that topic and any suggested changes.
That’s how it works at a nuts-and-bolts level. The key thing that Servais wanted to emphasise is that this process is always just offering suggestions. “We don’t have a magic wand or a gavel that can automatically change words in the printed book,” she said. After we spoke, I had coffee with Helen Gould, a sensitivity reader based in London, who first got hooked on fantasy books and now reads mostly genre fiction, historical fiction, and Greek and Roman classics. “My job is to give [authors] advice, not to make them take it. I don’t usually receive a copy of the book anyway, so I would have to buy the book and see, and who has the time? I’ve got too many books already,” Gould said, laughing.
I also spoke to Sachiko Suzuki, another US-based sensitivity reader. She is also a writer, with a guilty weakness for puns. “I’ve been seeing so many hot takes that people are ‘subjected to’ sensitivity reading but, in my experience, overwhelmingly people are seeking it out. Nobody wants to look like they don’t know basic things,” she said.
Many of the writers who have spoken out publicly about sensitivity readers are, perhaps inevitably, those who have been personally pissed off by the process, which they see as pandering to a perceived need for modern readers not to be “offended”. The readers I spoke to didn’t see this as their primary role. “What I’m looking for is harm, not offence,” said Gould. “I don’t think you can read a work for offensive content, because everyone’s going to find something different to be offended by.”
It’s also not how many authors see sensitivity reading. I spoke to the British author Melvin Burgess, a winner of the Carnegie Medal who has written 25 novels for children and adults, often dealing with controversial subjects like addiction and underage sex. He had a professional sensitivity reader on his 2022 novel Loki, which has a trans main character, and was glad of the input. “There were little bits of what you could call unconscious bias,” Burgess said. “Misogyny and racism and transphobia are pretty deep in our society, so I wouldn’t expect to write a book about these kinds of things and just get it right on my own.”
The term “sensitivity reading” itself may give the wrong impression. Servais prefers the term “authenticity reading”. The main goal, she said, “is making sure that characters, events, other story details, are captured accurately and authentically.”
Leon Craig, a short-story writer, sought a sensitivity reader on her 2022 collection Parallel Hells, which also features a trans woman. “I’m not trans, but I do have other minority identities that I’ve often seen represented in fiction in an ill-informed way, so I know how distracting it is to read a book which otherwise has well-rounded characters and then be confronted by the author using lazy stereotypes. It just takes you out of the experience.”
Helen Gould gave me an example that comes up a lot in the books she’s asked to consult on: Afro hair. It’s something that white authors often get wrong. In a book she consulted on, a mixed-race character had been straightening their hair for years. The writer had included a makeover scene where the character went to the salon and “restored her natural curls” — something that would likely be impossible and would be noticed by black readers. Servais cited a time she worked on a book where a character had a disability that made it difficult to walk but, for the narrative to take place as written, she would have to walk across a town in one day. This doesn’t sound very different, to my mind, from doing fact-checking work like searching Google Maps to see whether distances in your novel could be travelled in the time your characters travel them, or asking a car mechanic whether the way you describe engine repairs in your book sounds accurate.
And novelists have always done this. John le Carré went to Beirut and Phnom Penh to immerse himself in the cultures he wanted to write about. Cormac McCarthy used his MacArthur “genius grant” to go to the American south-west to research Blood Meridian. Gillian Flynn consulted extensively with a small-town cop and a lawyer to write Gone Girl. Even the greats get things wrong. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare writes that “the clock has stricken three”, a full 14 centuries before clocks that strike were invented.
At root, sensitivity reading is just editing. Before sensitivity readers existed, regular editors might flag elements in a text that they thought were in bad taste, were inaccurate or could be misconstrued. They still do this. But sensitivity readers are able to do it from a position of experience about a particular issue, rather than well-meaning guesswork. It’s also wrong to think that authors in the past never took on constructive criticism about their depiction of certain groups of people. Charles Dickens revised Oliver Twist extensively to remove some antisemitic tropes after speaking with a Jewish critic who reviewed the work.
Novelists are not required to take editorial suggestions, of any kind. Painting sensitivity readers as the people in power, wielding their influence over authors, seems disingenuous to me. Apart from anything else, they’re pretty underpaid for people doing specialist work that can involve mining traumatic events in their personal lives, as people who read for depictions of sexual assault, for instance, do. A sensitivity read on a novel of average length can be commissioned for $190.
So why do people resist sensitivity reading? With the Dahl books, some of it seems an understandable but mostly emotional reaction to thinking that things from your childhood are being taken away, said Mary-Anne Harrington, an editor at Headline. “People hate the feeling that the ‘wokerati’ are messing around with something that they grew up on.” It’s also new, and therefore easy to yoke together with broader signs of modern “snowflake” culture, if you’re already minded to get irritated by things like that.
One part of sensitivity reading that particularly rubs people the wrong way is “conscious language” use, the guiding principle behind many of the Dahl edits. Using the word “disabled”, say, rather than “handicapped” to describe someone with a physical impairment. This may, depending on your view of these things, strike you as wishy-washy. But no one’s saying you can’t have a prejudiced character in a book. Some people are prejudiced; books are allowed to be about ableism. But if the character you’re writing is not supposed to seem ableist, I don’t see what’s so controversial about ironing out accidental use of terms that might make some readers think your character is coming across that way.
I’m less sold on the idea that classics that have already been published ought to be messed with. It may be that what happened with Dahl will serve as a cautionary tale to editors rather than open a floodgate to further retroactive editing of this kind. As it happens, everyone I spoke to for this piece also thought the edits were questionable, for various different reasons. One is that the author isn’t alive to consent to the changes, which he surely would have objected to. Dahl never intended his works to be cosy and inclusive, but to “amusingly bully archetypes for the delight of readers”, as Suzuki put it. Another is that it just doesn’t achieve much, in this instance. Simply switching the word “fat” for “enormous” doesn’t change the fact that Augustus Gloop is the butt of the joke for being large. And to my mind, it sets a bad precedent for erasing difficult parts of literary history.
There are other ways around, which contextualise a work rather than bowdlerise it. On Disney Plus, if you try to watch Dumbo, for instance, which features outdated stereotypes of black people, a disclaimer plays before the film that reads: “These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
Let’s think about the term “harm” a bit more. It makes most sense in the context of children’s literature: there is a duty of protection on the part of authors and editors in an obvious sense to be mindful of what they are exposing children of different ages to. You wouldn’t include a sexually explicit scene in a book for six-year-olds, or multiple uses of the word “fuck”. When it comes to adult literature, the difference is that harm is worth trying to avoid, whereas offence isn’t. Harm, I gathered from talking to the sensitivity readers, is anything that contributes to wider societal prejudices. Offence is always going to be purely personal.
The straw man argument you sometimes hear that books on edgy topics like, for instance, Trainspotting wouldn’t “get past” a sensitivity reader these days, is, I think, flimsy. Gould agreed with me. What is probably true, she said, is that Irvine Welsh writing in 2023 might write Trainspotting slightly differently than he did in 1993 because society has changed in those 30 years. Everyone writes in a particular social and historical context. But there’s no reason a novel about addiction that goes deep into the gruesome horrors of being addicted couldn’t be published now. And in any case, Welsh wrote from personal experience of being addicted to heroin: he was able to be his own “sensitivity reader”.
Some of the things I’ve read about proposed sensitivity changes to books do strike me as going a bit far. In a piece for UnHerd, Clanchy notes that she was advised not to use the term “disfigured” to refer to a landscape. This is ridiculous. But if it’s only one of many editorial voices that get to pass comment on a text, and can be ignored, the occasional overzealous reader might cause an eye roll but shouldn’t be cause for massive upset.
I think it’s fair to say that author ego is playing a role in these discussions. Sometimes, it’s even by the author’s own admission. Anthony Horowitz wrote a piece in The Spectator recently complaining about a sensitivity read that was done on one of his books. “I made the changes, but I will confess they hurt. It just feels wrong to be told what to write by an outside party,” he wrote.
Burgess told me: “I think it’s the big, ‘I am the artist’. I’m not going to be very popular for saying that, but I do think it.” My guess is that this may become more difficult as an author reaches greater levels of acclaim. There are writers who become known for being “too big to edit”, and I’m sure it’s easy to get more precious about your work when you’ve become accustomed to being well-reviewed and courted as a talent. The sensitivity that is driving a lot of this controversy may not be the readers’ at all: it may be the writers’.
Being edited can be bruising. You spend months or even years working alone on your project. It’s precious to you. You pour a lot of yourself into it, and then you submit it, believing and hoping that it’s good. Having someone come back and say they disagree, in however small a way, is a sting authors have to get used to. “The process can be very frightening,” Gould acknowledges. “I never want to send feedback that is harsh and will make the writer want to stop working on the project. I always approach every project in good faith, assuming that they have good intentions, and that anything problematic that I find there is accidental.”
This stuff is not uncomplicated. There are concerns about how sensitivity reading is being used that come from sensitivity readers themselves. Some feel that it can be tokenistic. Or that sensitivity readers can be used cynically by publishers as a shield against criticism. “Then when a story comes out, and some people decide that they don’t like a decision that was made, they blame it on the sensitivity reader,” Servais said. This is viewed as a serious enough problem that an author called Justina Ireland, who oversaw a database of sensitivity readers called Writing in the Margins between 2016 and 2018, decided to stop maintaining the database as a result.
It would be naive to deny that a possible motive for publishers to have sensitivity reads done on books is to avoid negative public reaction to what is, at the end of the day, a product they are trying to sell. It has never been easier for readers to make their criticisms of a text publicly known via social media. And no doubt being at the receiving end of accusations of insensitivity or worse is unpleasant for a writer, and sometimes taken too far, and so publishers are sometimes looking to avoid that too. “Some of the criticism that authors are feeling at present is excessive, because generally, they’re just trying to produce work that is entertaining or challenging,” Harrington said.
But this is not the primary reason these reads are done by any means, nor should they be, Katie Packer, an editor at Hachette, told me. “I know people do use it for that, and I personally don’t think that it’s the way it needs to be used,” she said. “If you’re using it for that, probably something’s wrong with the book in the first place.”
Sensitivity reading is also a practice in its infancy that will no doubt develop. In an ideal world, Packer said, we wouldn’t need sensitivity readers so often, because the publishing industry would be more diverse. There would be more black editors working on books by black authors. But for now, most publishing professionals are white.
I’m not someone who believes authors should only write about things they have experienced themselves, or in the voices of characters like them. Because most authors are still white middle-class people, that would mean all books would be about white middle-class people. Which most still are, and this is one reason why championing work by people who are not white and middle class is worth everybody’s time. The people best able to write interesting work about people who aren’t white and middle class are people who aren’t white and middle class. But if you do write about things outside your own experience, it will inevitably involve more work from you as the writer, and your editors, to make that a successful endeavour.
That is work that sensitivity readers are helping to do. And it can make a book more creatively interesting, not less. In a piece for The Guardian in 2017, Lionel Shriver conjured the image of a writer buckling under “unrelenting anguish about hurting other people’s feelings” which “inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity”. But Gould points out that often, sensitivity readers help authors see that they’ve relied on tropes about certain types of people due to a lack of knowledge about them. And tired tropes are something every writer wants to avoid, no matter how they’ve crept in.
“We all make assumptions every day, we look at people and we stereotype them. And that happens in creative projects as well. So I’m helping to point out where those snap judgments have been made,” Gould said. She gives the example that lots of books feature black characters with absent fathers. “And in that case I might suggest, wouldn’t it be more interesting if this happened?” It’s an enriching process, done in collaboration with someone who can bring a particular perspective to your book and can help you make it better.
The unspoken question at stake is: what makes a book good? Is authenticity a prerequisite? Is a novel for anything, besides passing the reader’s time, and if so, does it need to feel “authentic” to do that thing? What’s the goal of all this authenticity-seeking?
In a Medium post from January 2021, the author Alexander Chee wrote that “the idea that a novel should be useful feels like something that is either neoliberal, or Marxist or abhorrent, or desirable, depending on where you’re standing”. The utility of a novel is a sticky subject matter. Do books need to be authentic in order to enact some kind of social change? I hope not. I don’t think a novel should be a moral guide, and there is something of a tilt towards this viewpoint by some contemporary readers. “There does seem to be a suggestion that fiction should be improving us in some way, and should be depicting society and individuals in positive ways,” Harrington told me. Teaching a lesson can’t be the mark of a good book. The ability to interpret and infer is central to the satisfaction of a novel: a little ambiguity, a little room for the reader to make the work their own. It’s part of what makes novels an exciting gamble to write. The novelist can’t join you at the table as you sit with the book in your hands and say, “What I would like you to understand by this is X.”
I do think, though, that a possible definition of a good book is one that helps you see the world through another person’s eyes. We all know that fiction can have noticeable effects. It might make you cry, it might make you laugh, it might annoy or even infuriate you, it might change your mind about something, it might stay with you for years and come to mind when you see a certain kind of tree — whatever. But I would argue that a novel can only really do this if it seems to reflect the world or some aspect of human experience in a way that is authentic, true to the way we understand it to be. One goal of a novelist might be to buff their work to the highest possible shine in order to offer this reflection; by making it feel to the reader as accurate to a real life as it can be, despite being fiction. Often the reason a novel works is because it allows you to lose yourself in the perspective of that person. If you are being distracted by what you feel is the unbelievability of that other, it disconnects you from the novel. The novel is worse.
“At their best, a novel can create a language that articulates something about human experience and emotion that people could not articulate before,” Suzuki said. “And anybody who does a good job with emotional articulation knows how powerful that is: being able to get things right so that people don’t get kicked out of the story.”
A novel isn’t primarily for its writer. I think most writers would accept that, once it’s off the desk, it belongs to the reader. That’s who you write it for. That’s why you put it out in the world instead of into a drawer. And if your book can be made to speak more eloquently, and to more readers, via the suggestions of third parties like sensitivity readers, that seems to me pretty hard to argue against.
Imogen West-Knights is a writer based in London. Her first novel, ‘Deep Down’, is out now
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