It does for us. It's not the abstract value that matters. A few years in my country, a critic caused some minor furore by suggesting that a beloved (and recent

It does for us. It's not the abstract value that matters. A few years in my country, a critic caused some minor furore by suggesting that a beloved (and recently dead) author wasn't all that good. She had been a radio personality and children's literature writer for a generation, and her stories were a kind of sweet, homely social realism, about growing up in an apartment building and playing the violin, for instance. Now the critic suggested that she had gotten chances others hadn't, because of her politics and identity. The public broadcaster at the time definitively saw shaping the country towards the labour party's social democratic vision as their job, and the author certainly fit nicely into that. Now the point is, even if the critic is right and this author wasn't all that great, she can't just be swapped out for me. I grew up with those books, not anyone else's. So did a generation. And so it is with all literature. Should we try to find the authors that got less attention at the time, but maybe would have deserved it? Maybe imagine what could have been? By all means. But what happened, happened. And it's even more important to understand those things.