It hardly seems to matter in contrast to the much more pressing developments around the world this year, but 2024, now that we’re almost at the end, was a shocking one for the literary world.

Three once-beloved authors, two of them deceased, faced controversy this year after scandalous revelations surfaced.

On July 3, British news website Tortoise Media reported that two women had made sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman, the celebrated author of The Sandman, American Gods, and Good Omens.

The allegations, spanning two decades, involve two women who came into contact with Gaiman in different capacities: one as a nanny for his child and the other as a fan of his work. While both women maintained they were in otherwise consensual relationships with the author, they accused him of engaging in degrading acts to which they did not consent.

The two women’s ages — 22 and 18 at the time they were involved with Gaiman — raised concerns about power imbalances and potential grooming. These initial revelations were followed by three more women coming forward with similar accusations against the author.

While Gaiman and his representatives strongly denied the allegations of sexual misconduct, the fallout from the accusations led to the cancellation or pause of at least three screen adaptations of his works. Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives, based on characters Gaiman and Matt Wagner created for DC Comics, was cancelled after its first season. Production on the third and final season of Amazon’s Good Omens, based on the 1990 novel by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, was paused, even though Gaiman offered to step back from his involvement in the show. On top of those, the development of a Disney film adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 young adult novel The Graveyard Book was put on hold.

Four days after the initial allegations against Gaiman were reported, the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, Andrea Robin Skinner, revealed that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child. Her mother, she stated, stayed with her stepfather even after he admitted to the abuse.

Skinner made these allegations in an essay for Canada's Toronto Star published on July 7, nearly a month after Munro died at the age of 92. According to her, the abuse began in 1976, when she was just nine and her stepfather Gerald Fremlin was in his 50s. Skinner revealed that she first told Munro about the abuse in 1992, when she was in her 20s, after the author voiced sympathy for a character in a story who was sexually abused by her stepfather. But Munro, Skinner wrote, “reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity”.

“She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ … she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men,” Skinner wrote in her essay. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her… She then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasising her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed. Did she realise she was speaking to a victim and that I was her child? If she did, I couldn’t feel it.”

Then, last month, Vanity Fair published what many called the "literary scoop of the year"—a bombshell article revealing the identity of Cormac McCarthy’s secret muse. The only catch? The muse, Augusta Britt, was a 16-year-old runaway when the enigmatic American author began a clandestine relationship with her. The revelation reignited debate around grooming, despite Britt, now in her 60s, attempting to reframe herself as not a victim.

So where does that leave fans of the three authors, who no doubt feel blindsided? In Gaiman’s case, at least, it is easier to separate the art from the artist, even if it seems a faux pas in the age of cancel culture. What I mean is that his work, at least, require no reinterpretation in light of new questions about his character.

For Munro and McCarthy, that is much harder to say.

My introduction with Munro was through one of her short stories. What struck me at the time, was the writer’s seemingly boundless empathy for her characters, no matter the gravity of their sin. In the light of Skinner’s account, however, it is hard not to see an apologist instead of someone with compassion.

Likewise for McCarthy, whose work often focuses on moralistic themes (albeit tempered by ‘natural forces’) – do we see someone justifying his own flaws as universal?

There is a quote I came across about artists that seems fitting. Try as I might, I cannot ascertain who said or wrote this. AI suggests multiple people, from George Orwell to Oscar Wilde, to Nietzsche. I suspect it was cooked up in the subconscious of the neural networks. It goes: “The artist is often a parasite on the lives of others. He demands a kind of freedom that can only be maintained by others' sacrifices, and he leaves behind a wake of ruin—friends betrayed, women exhausted, lives shattered—all for the sake of his work.”

In the modern age, we often look to artists and writers as thought leaders. This tendency prompts us to hold them up as paragons of virtue, even when we don’t intend to. This is no excuse for questionable behaviour. We are right to judge people by their actions, as intentions without right action don’t mean a thing. However, we must guard ourselves against their undue veneration, or we risk the disillusionment of meeting our heroes.