In his introduction to Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, Anthony Lee asserts that ‘any relationship involving an exercise of authority […] inevitably evokes forgotten or repressed memories and/or fantasies from childhood experiences, where human beings first encounter an authority greater than themselves’, involving the protégé’s ‘dependent, often helpless, relation to more powerful parental figures’. When, as an adult, the protégé is ‘placed in a posture of dependency, the childhood structures worm their way back to the surface tangents of consciousness’, and they replay the child-parent relationship with their mentor. If childhood relationships with the parent are marked by emotional unavailability, separation or loss, this can have a catastrophic impact on the development of mentoring relationships in adulthood.