Biographers of the novelist have long puzzled over her habit of burning each day's discarded pages in the evening, a ritual she maintained even after she could afford, and increasingly required, a typist to preserve her work. In a letter to her sister, unearthed decades after her death, she offered an explanation her biographers had not considered: 'I do not burn the pages because they are bad. I burn them because a discarded sentence, kept, becomes a small tribunal I must answer to every morning. Better that it simply not exist to ask me why I chose otherwise.' The letter reframes the burning not as self-criticism but as a deliberate refusal to let past choices accumulate a vote in present ones.