Responsibility

When people don’t understand our work, it is always our fault. What the reader wants, above all, is to penetrate our thought, and that is what you arrogantly deny him. I understood you, because I knew you. If I’d been given your book without your name on it, I’d have thought it splendid, but strange, and I’d have asked myself whether you were immoral, skeptical, indifferent, or heartbroken.  You say that’s how it should be, that M. Flaubert would violate the rules of good taste if he were to reveal his opinions or the aim of his book. That is false—utterly false. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one sympathizes with him and is ready to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you skim over it. or put it down.

George Sand, letter to Gustave Flaubert,  January 12, 1876