…there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes not only books that don’t describe the world from a woman’s point of view, but inculcate denigration and degradation of women as cool things to do.

At Lit Hub, Rebecca Solnit discusses empathizing versus identifying with characters in literature, particularly in Nabokov’s Lolita, and the privilege inherent in overrepresentation: