8 Books That the Authors Regretted Writing

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most influential children’s books of all time; it has been referenced, retold, and parodied in hundreds of later novels, has been adapted for film, and has influenced written and visual media the world over. However, in 2014, a letter by Charles Dodgson — Carroll’s real name — was discovered, talking about how much he hated the publicity that came with such a wildly successful book. Dodgson admitted, “I hate all that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish I had never written any books at all,” and would send terse and angry responses to anyone who wrote to him using his pen name.

Best-known for Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson is a prolific author, but her book Boating For Beginners is less well-known, in part because of Winterson’s personal ambivalence towards the novel. While she doesn’t hate it, Winterson is frank about her reasons for publishing Boating For Beginners: she needed the cash and was able to write the book quickly. Coming out three months after Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Boating For Beginners was a very different story, intended to be a light comedy. Winterson regretted the impact on her early literary career, saying, “I knocked up B for B and of course just after it appeared Oranges won the Whitbread and then I just didn’t make sense to people.” Luckily, the success of her later books — as recently as 2019, her book Frankissstein was shortlisted for the Booker Prize — means that the oddness of Boating For Beginners has been forgotten.

Winterson regretted her second book, but J. G. Ballard regretted his first, to the point where he often pretended that his debut was his novel The Drowned World. The Wind From Nowhere was written and published first, but Ballard admitted in interviews that he had only written the book in order to make money and didn’t actually like it. It was completed in ten days, and Ballard felt it was cliched and nothing more than hack work.

The star of 19 children’s books, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, is a beloved part of many readers’ childhoods. Orlando’s adventures were published over four decades, between the 1930s and the 1970s, and were the brainchild of artist Kathleen Hale, first created to entertain her two young children. However, despite enjoying the success of the books, Hale “felt that Orlando had rather hijacked her career as a painter,” a career she had been working on since the ’20s.

It’s common knowledge that the real-life Christopher Robin, son of author A. A. Milne, grew up to resent his portrayal in the hugely popular Winnie the Pooh series after being bullied at school and being referred to in connection to his childhood toys for the remainder of his life. Christopher Robin’s dislike of the books put a strain on Milne’s relationship with his son, but Milne also came to regret the books, as readers would not take any of his other work, such as his plays and nonfiction writing, seriously, thanks to the whimsy and childlike atmosphere of the Pooh stories.

Octavia E. Butler was a hugely influential sci-fi writer, with works like Fledgling and Lilith’s Brood being perennial favourites of fans of the genre. One of Butler’s many series, the Patternist books, includes Survivor, a novel published in 1978. Survivor can be hard for modern-day Butler fans to get hold of, however, as Butler herself disliked the novel. She referred to it as “really offensive garbage,” feeling that it had colonialist vibes, as the story features humans travelling to another planet and interacting with the “natives” that they found there.

Many writers who have regretted books state a dislike of the story itself or the impact on their own lives or future careers as the reason. Some, however, have regretted a book because of its impact on the wider world — in the case of The Anarchist Cookbook, because of its popularity amongst domestic terrorists and other violent figures. These links are far from tenuous — the book contains instructions on how to make explosives, weapons, and illegal drugs, amongst many other things. Powell spoke out frequently on how his views have changed since he wrote the book as an angry young man and tried to have the book “quickly and quietly taken out of print.” However, as he did not hold the copyright, he was unsuccessful.

Jaws was a runaway bestseller, and the movie version, released a year after the book’s publication, was the first summer blockbuster, so iconic that even people who haven’t seen the film can recognise lines and references from the movie (particularly the notorious soundtrack). However, while Jaws hardly had the same kind of explosive impact as The Anarchist Cookbook, it did cause massive real-world harm. Jaws cemented sharks in the public consciousness as dangerous killers, eager to attack humans, when in reality, shark attacks are vanishingly rare, and sharks can, in fact, be friendly and affectionate creatures. Benchley was so upset by the fact that Jaws gave legitimacy to shark hunting that he devoted the rest of his life to attempts to protect the animals.