Men leave their children to pursue their art, or their whatever, so often that it hardly bears noticing. And it’s certainly not perceived as monstrous enough to disrupt our experience of their work. But I look at Lessing with a gimlet eye, my experience of her altered, stained by this perception of monstrousness, wondering if her fierce intellect is somehow causally tied to her cold abandoning heart. I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m saying it happens. Again: that’s how stains work.
