A wronged author lets loose on the literary world about what she saw as the critical kneecapping of her book based on the social ideals of the critics:

These days I have a better understanding of the intolerance to which, for a while, I fell victim. I see that, like all intolerance, it arose from dependence on an ideal. I see that cruelty and rudeness and viciousness are its harbingers, as they have always been. I see that many – most – of my female detractors continue to write routinely in the press about motherhood and issues relating to children. Their interest in these issues has a fixated quality, compared with their worldly male equivalents. I am struck by this distinction, for it is clear that they hunger to express themselves not as women, not as commentators or intellectuals, but as mothers. This hunger evidently goes unsatisfied, and must content itself with scraps from the table of daily news.

A response piece by a critic tries to clarify:

It was not a word that she used, but it was clear that she felt something like persecution and, catching the tone of many of the pieces she quoted, it was plain enough to see why.

The word she did use, however, was intolerance; an intolerance, she decided, that “arose from dependence on an ideal”, in this case an ideal of motherhood. But the mention of intolerance seems to take literary criticism into another arena, one in which the critics’ expression of their point of view, however trenchantly expressed, becomes confused with their view of the writer’s right to write what she has written.

To take strenuous issue with a piece of work seems an entirely different matter from feeling that it shouldn’t have come into being at all; and it seems unlikely that even Cusk’s harshest critics were suggesting that.