Jeanette Winterson's memoir
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? offers up a funny, incisive chapter, "English Literature A-Z," where Nabokov appears throughout. (She is not a fan.) Favorite bit appears after the fold:
I had two English teachers. The main one was a sexy wildman who eventually married one of our classmates when she managed to turn eighteen. He said that Nabokov was truly great and that one day I would understand that. "He hates women," I said, not realizing that this was the beginning of my feminism.
"He hates what women become," said the wildman. "That's different. He loves women until they become what they become."
And then we had an argument about Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, and the revolting Rosamund, whom all the men prefer, presumably because she hasn't become what women become...
The argument led nowhere and I went trampolining with a couple of girls who weren't worried about Dorothea Brooke or Lolita. They just liked trampolining. (122-3)
