The Professor & his Feminist Student

[Terrance]

With the rise of Feminism, novelists like Doris Lessing and Margaret
Atwood aroused excited attention. Someone so decidedly male as Nabokov,
equipped by his upbringing with gentlemanly notions of honor and more
comfortable with woman as muse than woman as writer, seemed a relic of
the past. After all, it was he who had created Humbert, for whom Lolita
barely exists except as a mere object of *his* emotion and *his*
imagination. It could be easily overlooked that for Nabokov Lolita was
quite a different creature, a person in her own right, and one of the
characters he found most admirable in all his works, or that his book
seethed with indignation of Humbert's manipulation of *all* the women in
his life. (Boyd, VN)