Soon after the allegations against him were published, Weinstein’s wife Georgina Chapman announced she was leaving him. I kept thinking: what about his children? You can, at least in principle, leave a husband, but you can’t leave a father.

In her poem ‘Sunday Night’, Sharon Olds describes her father, during family meals in restaurants, putting

Here, closeness is interpenetration of a dangerous kind; intimacy is drugging, threatening to consciousness, wakefulness, alertness. Boundaries are broken, or never established, and merging ensues. We inhabit, become, and reproduce our parents. They are in us; we are made of them, for good and for ill.

Sharon Olds, like Gornick, has written plentifully from her own life—about her parents, her husband, her children, her divorce—and has spent years navigating the agitated responses to such writing. It’s generally assumed, and insisted upon, that writing from one’s own life is the definition of exposure and of vulnerability. In some ways that is true, not least because the politics of speech and sexuality for women do make them vulnerable to judgement, to shaming, and to violence. But something else is sidelined by this insistence on the vulnerability of first-person writing, which is that writing isn’t simply exposure: it is also protection. Writing is a spell; it conjures a person anew, and erects a protective wall. It can create a clear and ferocious distinction between self and other. It can enable the finding of a way ‘to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation’.

This is how psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described the experience of ‘feeling real’—an experience dependent on positive early parenting, on ‘good-enough’ mothering. (His language reflects the fact that it has usually been mothers who do the bulk of early parenting, though he underlined that the role of the good-enough mother can be fulfi lled by others.) For Winnicott, this good-enough experience involved the mother’s absorption in the infant; her flexible management of the infant’s frustration and disappointment in her; and her ability to tolerate and survive the infant’s aggression towards her. She must be able both to mirror the child back to itself, and to withstand its destructive impulses; be able to let him pursue a ‘ruthless relation’ to her, a ‘benign exploitation’ of her.

The formidable challenge of parenting is to nurture an environment which is, as Adam Phillips put it in his book on Winnicott, ‘suffi ciently resilient and responsive to withstand the full blast of the primitive love impulse’—and the full blast of aggression. ‘Shall I say’, wrote Winnicott, ‘that, for a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest part of his nature, someone has to be defi ed, and even at times hated … without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship?’

Woolf herself was no stranger to tyrannical, possessive fathers; her father Leslie Stephen formed the basis of her depiction of Victorian fathers in her fiction—in The Years, in Night and Day, in To the Lighthouse. Leslie Stephen enacted a suffocating domination of his daughters, particularly his stepdaughter Stella Duckworth, and all the more so after the death of their mother Julia Stephen.

Hermione Lee writes that, after Julia’s untimely death, Leslie Stephen ‘completely appropriated Stella as a substitute and she had allowed him to do it.’ Woolf herself, in ‘Reminiscences’, written between 1907 and 1908, said that

This hierarchy of the public over the private—of the freedoms of professional life over the constraints of family—is entangled with social privilege, however. As bell hooks put it in 1984, ‘Many black women were saying “we want to have more time to share with our family, we want to leave the world of alienated work”’. And the workplace to which less privileged women have always been tied may not hold out the same alluring promise of freedom.

Yet Woolf has no illusions about either realm. The daughters of educated men are, she writes, ‘between the devil and the deep sea. Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity … its servility.’ And then, tantalisingly but disappointingly, ‘Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed’—all words that could be applied to Leslie Stephen. Public and private alike are rotten for women.

Three Guineas charts the resistance of men to women’s incursions into public life. Woolf was, while writing the essay, ruminating, with her familiar mixture of curiosity and ambivalence when assessing other writers’ works, on the ideas of Freud that were garnering interest in England at this time. She describes fathers as ‘massed together in societies, in professions’, and reluctant to let their daughters out to work. ‘Society it seems’, she wrote, ‘was a father, and afflicted with the infantile fixation too.’

Work, however, has not been the refuge it was hoped to be. In ‘Revolutionary Parenting’, bell hooks writes, ‘The women’s liberationists who wanted to enter the work force did not see this world as a world of alienated work. They do now.’ In recent years, public scrutiny of sexual harassment in the workplace has intensifi ed, with good reason, though it has focused largely on the film and music industries, on the media and political classes—on Woolf’s professions. Can this renewed scrutiny be usefully read as, among other things, a story of white, middle-class disillusion with the emancipatory promise of work?