From the book jacket:

The first new novel from Doris Lessing in more than seven years, Love, Again tells the
story of a sixty-five-year-old woman who falls in love. Or rather, Sarah Durham falls into
a state of love, which is another country altogether, and struggles to maintain her sanity
while there.

Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater
in London. When she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and
androgynous twenty-eight-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature, thirty-five-year-
old director Henry, Sarah finds herself in a state of longing and desire she thought the
province of younger women.

Each of the characters in Love, Again is deeply involved in the production of a play based
on the journals of Julie Vairon, a lovely and wayward French girl from Martinique. A
"free woman" ahead of her time, Vairon followed a young lover to France, where she
remained until her tragic death in 1912, just before the First World War, which changed
the lives of women forever - or did it? Sarahs entanglement with Julie Vairon's life - her
art, her seductive and disturbing music, her love affairs - informs Sarah's relationships
with several men, all of them under the spell of Julie and the theater.

This richly textured novel explores the affinities and connections between romantic love,
depression and grief, homesickness and the emotional deprivations of childhood. The two
men with whom Sarah falls in love, one after the other, cause her to relive her own stages
of growing up, from immature and infantile love to the mature.

Closer to The Golden Notebook in its ironies and complexities than anything Doris
Lessing has written since, Love, Again is a brilliant anatomy of love - of longing, grief, an
older woman's sexuality, of all the experiences of love available to a woman in her
lifetime - from a master of human psychology who is also one of the most daring writers
of fiction at work today.

ABOUT A YEAR AGO a women's magazine wanted to interview me about

women and ageing. Out of the blue the reporter asked: "Wouldn't you agree
that every woman deserves to experience at least one grand passion?"
I was somewhat taken aback and all I could do was nod in polite agreement.
When I was sent the interview it said: "'Everyone deserves at least one grand
passion', says Merete Mazzarella." I managed to get the sentence removed but I
don't think I managed to convince the reporter that there was anything wrong
with her approach.
I have thought of her now and then - like me she was around fifty and I have
wondered whether she had had her grand passion or was still waiting.
(I have of course also wondered whether she imagined me to be still waiting.)
I was reminded of her once again when I read Doris Lessing's latest novel,
Love, again which is specifically about women and ageing - and about women
and passion. These themes are by no means new in Lessing's work: in The
Summer Before the Dark the main character is a woman who has been used to
turning heads and who at forty suddenly begins to feel invisible because
construction workers have stopped whistling after her.
The protagonist of Love,again - which by and large has had a
chillier reception than The Summer Before the Dark - is sixty-
five-year-old Sarah Durham who, long widowed, has thrown
all her energy into writing plays and running a small theatre
group in London. The group is producing a play about Julie
Vairon, a beautiful, mysterious and artistically gifted young
quadroon from Martinique who in the early nineteenth century
accompanied a lover to France, was jilted, managed to make her living as a
teacher in the provinces, was jilted once more - and finally drowned herself just
as a respectable small town citizen had offered to make an honest woman of
her. Julie comes across not only as a feminist pioneer but also as a kind of
female Orpheus, both seductive and dangerous who - even a century and a half
after her death - seems to set free the dreams and secret longings of all who
come into contact with her. As far as Sarah is concerned this means falling in
love - not once but twice, and both times with men young enough to be her
sons, men who are drawn to her but are ultimately not willing to enter into even
a casual sexual relationship with her.
Sarah looks at those around her - who all seem young younger than she - and
feels like "a miserable old ghost at the feast". After decades of being busy,
successful and perfectly content she now observes both her body and her
psychological reactions with a mixture of clear-sightedness, self-hatred and
humiliation - she wonders at her sudden desire to buy new clothes at her
impulse to have her face lifted: "With better luck (meaning, if I had not entered
Julie's territory), I could have lived comfortably with something like a light
dimmimg, or a fire dying down unnoticed, and arrived at being really old,
hardly feeling the transition."
As it is, she slides into a long depression which she herself compares to a
physical illness and which Lessing describes with such chilling intensity that
the reader cannot but feel her pain.
Why then has the reception of the novel not been more enthusiastic? One
reason is certainly that the people around Sarah - including the two objects of
her passion - come across as strangely shadowy: neither the twenty-eight-year-
old, androgynous and somewhat manipulative actor Ben nor the slightly older,
more immediately appealing but married director Henry ultimately seems to
have much life outside of Sarah's imagination. Even less convincing - except as
a kind of Gothic fantasy - is the portrait of Sarah's friend, the wealthy
landowner Stephen, who contributes money to the theatre because he has
persuaded himself that he is in love with the dead Julie and whose wife has
withdrawn into a Lesbian relationship.
Another reason is that Lessing has wanted to do so much more than simply
describe an ageing woman's struggles with a sudden upsurge of sexual feelings
long thought dead. She has also wanted to analyse the concept of romanticism
and to show the long-term consequences of childhood experiences of rejection.
She editorialises on the way a younger generation views love, on the deplorable
state of modern education in Britain and on how Art is exploited in the interests
of commercial profit: the play Julie Vairon is turned into a musical and Julie's
small French town is exploited by the tourist industry. There is simply too
much telling and too little showing - worse, there is too much lecturing.
It is almost as if Lessing's real story is so painful that she is tempted to
distance herself from it by constant digressions.
But it is certainly also possible that the negativity of Lessing's critics is in part
a result of their need to distance themselves, to repress threatening insights - or
possibilities. No, Love, again is by no means a well-balanced work but it's a
work that continues to challenge one's peace of mind.

Lessing sets the stage for what could be, and sometimes is, an elegant comedy of
manners. The play, JULIE VAIRON: AN ENTERTAINMENT, tells the story of a young
quadroon girl from Martinique who fell in love with a young French officer and returned
with him to the Provencal town of Belles Rivieres. The romantic story counterpoints the
emotional upheavals besetting the members of the production.

The actors fall in and out of love with each other during the rehearsal period. The
preenings, flirtations, and physical desires that flourish in close proximity are precisely
detailed, and Lessing weaves in allusions both to the literature and pop culture of love
that enrich the texture of the relationships.

Sarah, infatuated first with a young actor and then with the middle-aged director, is
forced to confront the longing, grief and despair that had been deeply buried in her
psyche for many years.

At times the reader may become annoyed with the seeming fecklessness of the characters
—too many of them seem to race headlong into certain disaster. The author’s equivocal
tone wavers between tragic and comic, leaving the reader to wonder whether to laugh or
cry at the plight of love’s victims. The wide-ranging focus gives the novel a messy feel—
ends are left untied and situations unresolved—yet life is inherently messy. What Lessing
has presented in LOVE, AGAIN is a slice of life.

Readers are not often offered a novel that explores the passage into old age. Lessing
confronts the issue unsentimentally, and often, ironically. Sarah Durham is, at the end of
the novel, an old woman—not doddering or dependent, but cognizant of her age and the
significant change in her life.
Love, Again is Doris Lessing's first novel in eight years. Fans will find a restatement
of several of her familiar themes and the exploration of one or two new ones.
Readers in general will find a complex novel whose most interesting passages are
grim and whose relentless exposition leaves little to console. At 77, Lessing is pulling
no punches.

Sarah Durham is, at 65, a moderately successful theatre producer. Her small London
theatre is involved in the production of a show about Julie Vairon, a 19th-century
writer and composer who was drawn from Martinique to France by an ill-fated love
affair. The development and performance of the play, with its highly charged musical
content, and its evolution from an intimate theatre piece to an obviously lush and
overdone musical, is the background to a densely melodramatic story.

As the actors, writers and directors fall under the spell of Julie Vairon's music and her
memoirs of unresolved love affairs, Sarah Durham wakes to a state of forgotten
erotic potential. Widowed for 20 years, her children grown up, she has put her own
sexuality on hold as theatre business and concern for an emotionally disturbed niece
have absorbed her life. Troubled by Julie's troubadour music, haunted by fragments
of memories of her own marriage, Sarah enters what Lessing calls "Julie's country,"
a mental state of readiness for love.

Sarah befriends Stephen Ellington-Smith, the affluent landed gentleman who is

backing the theatre project, and finds that he has fallen in love with Julie Vairon --
hopelessly and deeply in love with a woman 80 years dead. Within a short time
Sarah finds herself lusting after the handsome, androgynous young actor Bill, who is
only 28, and who is flirting shamelessly with her as well.

Lessing takes big chances that her story will come off as farce rather than as the
dead-serious account of human grief and sorrow that it is, and only by an act of iron
will does she keep the book on track. Stephen becomes a tragic figure as Sarah's
understanding and empathy for his state of mind deepen, but Bill, and later the
young director Henry, for whom Sarah develops a more mutual but equally
unrealized romance, remain flat characters whose purpose is to let Sarah explore the
depths of unresolved passions. The seriousness of Sarah's introspection into her own
pain and her own motives distracts from the question of a 65-year-old's
attractiveness to young men, and the sheer agony of Stephen's situation keeps us
from snickering at him.

There is no comforting resolution here. Even the people who get what they want, or
think they do, are not guaranteed happiness. Stephen's wife in the arms of her
lesbian lover, merry young American actors homeward bound to "meaningful
relationships," ambitious Sonia's vicious courtship of the hapless young theatre critic,
Henry with his small son--nobody provides any image of requited love that is bound
for anything but eventual pain. In Sarah's voice Lessing probes the sources of that
need and that pain:

One day the thought had popped whole and fully fledged into her head, as if it had
been waiting there for her to recognize it: Am I really to believe that the awful,
crushing anguish, the longing so terrible it seems one's heart is being squeezed by
cruel fingers--all that is only what a baby feels when it is hungry and wants its
mother? [...] To fall in love is to remember one is an exile, and that is why the
sufferer does not want to be cured, even when crying, 'I can't endure this non-life, I
can't endure this desert.'

The most searing parts of the book are Sarah's meditations on love and aging. This
isn't new ground for Lessing, but it's a harsher view than she took in The Diaries of
Jane Somers, written in the early 1980s. Janna Somers also struggled with love
and aging and pain, and also had a niece that could barely fend for herself, but
obviously Lessing felt she had more delving to do on the subject. And it's not
comforting, any of it. The scene in which Sarah undresses for the mirror,
remembering how she was and how she now is, "she has to insist that this is so,
this is the truth: not what I remember: this is what I am seeing, this is what I am.
This. This." -- is almost unbearably painful, and as a message from an older writer to
younger readers, a dire insight that perhaps we'd rather not have.

The intersection of love and age is not a pleasant one, although not all of Lessing's
meditations on age are as grim:

Somewhere about middle age, it occurs to most people that a century is only their
own lifetime twice. On that thought, all of history rushes together, and now they live
inside the story of time, instead of looking at it from outside, as observers. Only ten
or twelve of their lifetimes ago, Shakespeare was alive. The French Revolution was
just the other day.

One of Lessing's themes has been that sometimes people get damaged and cannot
be fixed, and aging is a subset of this. But she is almost as fascinated by people who
are unaccountably incompetent and helpless as by those whose instability can be
explained by personal history. About Joyce, the niece in Love, Again, Sarah says:
"Joyce had an 'I cannot cope' gene, or lacked an 'I can cope' gene, or had one in the
wrong place, and her life had been governed by this. The puppet strings do not have
to be psychological, though it is our inclination to think they are."

As with the title character in The Fifth Child, Lessing doesn't even try to explain
what she thinks is the cause of such anomalies. She describes the characters and the
situation and leaves conclusions or further theorizing to the reader. Lessing has been
asking questions for a long time, questions which get down to the basics of who we
are, how we are, how certain things come about within people and societies. When
she doesn't have the answers she doesn't fake up a theory: as a novelist she is free
not to do so. It's what makes her fascinating to read, if sometimes disturbing,
irritating, even depressing at times.

In Love, Again Lessing has perhaps let the bones of her questions show through,
skimping characterization for introspective analysis, but that's a minor weakness.
The book is a strong message from a courageous older woman, a postcard from age
to youth. Don't read Love, Again on a lonely rainy weekend when your resistance is
low, but do read it.

Love, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her
sanity. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in
London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful
and androgynous 28-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature 35-year-old director Henry.
Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger
women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her
earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love
from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work
today.

Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme
(1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (to which she returned in
The Good Terrorist (1985)), the psychological theme (1956–1969), and after that the Sufi
theme, which was explored in a science fiction setting in the Canopus series.

Lessing's switch to science fiction was not popular with many critics. For example, in the
New York Times in 1982 John Leonard wrote in reference to The Making of the
Representative for Planet 8 that "One of the many sins for which the 20th century will be
held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs. Lessing.... She now propagandizes on
behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic razzmatazz."[24] To which Lessing replied:
"What they didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of
our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like Blood Music, by Greg Bear.
He's a great writer."[25] Unlike some authors primarily known for their mainstream work,
she has never hesitated to admit that she writes science fiction. She was Writer Guest of
Honour at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), and made a well-
received speech in which she described her science-fictional Memoirs of a Survivor as
"an attempt at an autobiography."[26]

Her novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars, but
notably not by the author herself, who later wrote that its theme of mental breakdowns as
a means of healing and freeing one's self from illusions had been overlooked by critics.
She also regretted that critics failed to appreciate the exceptional structure of the novel.
As she explains in Walking in the Shade Lessing modelled Molly, to an extent, on her
good friend Joan Rodker, the daughter of the author and publisher John Rodker.[27]

Lessing does not like the idea of being pigeon-holed as a feminist author. When asked
why, she replies:

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from
religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I
stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men
are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and
women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.

– Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July, 1982[8]

When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the
Canopus in Argos science fiction series (1979–1983). These books show, from many
different perspectives, an advanced society's efforts at forced evolution (also see
Progressor and Uplift). The Canopus series is based partly on Sufi concepts, to which
Lessing was introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher", Idries Shah.
[23]
Earlier works of "inner space" fiction like Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and
Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) also connect to this theme (Lessing's interest turned to
Sufism after coming to the realization that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her
disillusioned).

Love, Again.
By: Newson, Adele S.

Publication: World Literature Today

Date: Sunday, September 22 1996

Doris Lessing's most recent novel, Love, Again, explores familial relationships,
romantic love, loss, life in the theater, and human folly against the backdrop of the
aging process. It is also a study of love and loving intertwined with reflections on the
writer - her craft and detractors. Lessing's narrative is interspersed with dreams,
correspondence, waking anguish, and interpretation of "ordinary" existence. In this
work Lessing forges below surfaces, traveling to often uncomfortable venues. Still,
the tapestry she weaves is intensely satisfying.

Sarah Durham is a sixty-five-year-old widow who has not been in love for twenty

years. One of the managers of a small theater in London, Sarah at last becomes

affected by the theatrical scene. Music, actors, and the make-believe operate to

transform the sensible widow into a creature of emotions. Like a younger heroine,

she takes her readers and her suitors on a merry chase. And as in the play that

throws her into the society of the men she would covet, she experiences "too much

of everything: too many ragged ends, false starts, possibilities rejected - too much

life, in short, so it all had to be tidied up."

The play, largely adapted from the journals of Julie Vairon, a nineteenth-century

quadroon who lived in Martinique and then in France, is the focal point of

development in the novel. Sarah, who undertakes to adapt the journals to the stage,

is moved by the heroine's life, visual artistry, and music. Vairon's journals reveal her

life to be a series of dispassionate observations on three loves, all of whom are

wealthy, white, and unattainable. Sarah has read the journals and has recast them

for the stage, accompanied by Vairon's own music. It is during the process of

attaining backing for the play that Sarah meets Stephen Ellington-Smith, a wealthy

Maecenas who is himself "in love" with Julie Vairon. During the course of production,

the director and leading men fall in love with Sarah. Stephen is assigned the safe

position of "brother," and Sarah struggles with her newfound, unwanted emotional
state. Of her precarious state, she muses, "Old women by the thousand - probably

by the million - are in love and keep quiet about it. They have to."

Interspersed with Sarah's intrigues are dramatic questions. Was Julie Vairon

murdered? Who is in love with whom in this array of theatrical characters? Will Sarah

ever be free of the yoke of her brother's emotionally disturbed laughter? Is there a

cure for Stephen? As one of Sarah's younger, self-confessed lovers explains, the

situation is to be blamed on the theater: "It's all the fault of the theater, of show

business, so don't take any notice." If theater is the culprit, however, what is the

remedy? Ultimately, Sarah muses:

To fall in love is to remember one is an exile, and that is why the sufferer does not

want to be cured, even while crying, "I can't endure this non-life, I can't endure this

desert."

Another thought, perhaps of a more practical kind: When Cupid aims his arrows (not

flowers or kisses) at the elderly and old, and brings them to grief, is this one way of

hustling people who are in danger of living too long off the stage, to make way for

the new?

Readers will immediately compare Lessing's efforts in Love, Again with those of The

Summer Before Dark, her 1973 novel of Kate Brown's awakening at age forty-five

into an awareness of her position in the world. Kate, afflicted by a mysterious

malaise, has an affair with a sickly younger man and eventually accepts her own

aging. Love, Again, however, is richer, more fulfilling with its false starts and turns,

much like life itself. Sarah is a vital character alternately young and old, maternal

and predatory, reserved and daring. The novel's commentaries on human folly,

observations on love and art, use of a tale within a tale to spur action, and melodic

language make it a work well worth experiencing.

BIOGRAPHY
Doris Lessing was born in Persia (present-day Iran) to British parents in 1919. Her family moved to
Southern Africa where she spent her childhood on her father's farm in what was then Southern
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). When her second marriage ended in 1949, she moved to London, where
her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. The book explores the complacency
and shallowness of white colonial society in Southern Africa and established Lessing as a talented
young novelist.

She is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels,
short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of twentieth-century issues and concerns,
from the politics of race that she confronted in her early novels set in Africa, to the politics of
gender which lead to her adoption by the feminist movement, to the role of the family and the
individual in society, explored in her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The books in the 'Children of Violence' series (1952-69) are strongly influenced by Lessing's
rejection of a domestic family role and her involvement with communism. The novels are
autobiographical in many respects, telling the story of Martha Quest, a girl growing up in Africa who
marries young despite her desperate desire to avoid the life her mother has led. The second book in
the series, A Proper Marriage (1954), describes the unhappiness of the marriage and Martha's
eventual rejection of it. The sequel, A Ripple from the Storm (1958), is very much a novel of ideas,
exploring Marxism and Martha's increasing political awareness. By the time that this book was
written, however, Lessing had become disillusioned with communism and had left the party.

With the publication of her next novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing became firmly
identified with the feminist movement. The novel concerns Anna Wulf, a writer caught in a personal
and artistic crisis, who sees her life compartmentalised into various roles - woman, lover, writer,
political activist. Her diaries, written in different coloured notebooks, each correspond to a different
part of herself. Anna eventually suffers a mental breakdown and it is only through this
disintegration that she is able to discover a new 'wholeness' which she writes about in the final
notebook.

The pressures of social conformity on the individual and mental breakdown under this pressure was
something that Lessing returned to in her next two novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)
and The Summer Before the Dark (1973). Briefing for a Descent into Hell is about a man who is
found wandering the streets of London with no memory of a 'normal' life, while Kate, the central
character of The Summer Before the Dark, achieves a kind of enlightenment through what doctors
would describe as a breakdown.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Doris Lessing turned almost exclusively to writing fantasy and
science fiction in the 'Canopus in Argos' series, developing ideas which she had touched on towards
the end of 'Children of Violence' and in Briefing for a Descent into Hell. The first book in the series,
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, was published in 1979. The fourth, The Making of the
Representative for Planet 8, was adapted by Philip Glass as an opera, with a libretto by the author.
She made a return to realist fiction with Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could ...
(1984), sent to her publisher under the pseudonym Jane Somers. They were turned down for
publication several times and when published had only small print runs and few reviews. When the
truth was uncovered, the books were, of course, reprinted to much greater acclaim.

Lessing's more recent novels have continued to confront taboos and challenge preconceptions,
generating many different and conflicting critical opinions. In The Good Terrorist (1985), Lessing
returned to the political arena, through the story of a group of political activists who set up a squat
in London. The book was awarded the WH Smith Literary Award. The Fifth Child (1988) is also
concerned with alienation and the dangers inherent in a closed social group. Harriet and David react
to the hedonism and excesses of the 1960s by setting themselves up in a large house and
embarking on an enthusiastic programme of childbearing and domestic bliss. Their fifth child,
however, emerges as a malevolent, troll-like and angry figure who quickly disrupts the family idyll.

The acclaimed first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), won the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize (for biography), and was followed by a second volume, Walking in the Shade:
Volume II of My Autobiography 1949-1962 (1997).

Doris Lessing's recent fiction includes Ben, in the World (2000), a sequel to the The Fifth Child, and,
The Sweetest Dream (2001), which follows the fortunes of a family through the twentieth century,
set in London during the 1960s and contemporary Africa. She was made a Companion of Honour by
the British Government in 1999, and is President of Booktrust, the educational charity that
promotes books and reading. In 2001 she received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

Doris Lessing lives in London. Her recent books include: the grandmothers (2003), a collection of
four short novels centred on an unconventional extended family; and Time Bites (2004), a selection
of essays based on her life experiences. Her latest book is Alfred and Emily (2008), which explores
the lives of both her parents.

In 2007, Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On Not Winning the Nobel Prize
(2008) is the full text of the lecture she gave to the Swedish Academy when accepting the prize.
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, it seemed that, at last, the highest
literary honour was being placed on a woman who has surveyed and judged mankind in the latter
half of the 20th century like no other writer. She perceives the operations of sex, power and society
by way of a mystical vision that makes her the heir to D.H. Lawrence. Her observations are not
always comfortable ones, and this may be one reason why she has troubled the literary and political
world so much – she is a fierce writer, unafraid to speak unpalatable truths. Although Lessing
cannot be easily categorised, her work is united by her being a moralist, an investigator of states of
consciousness and forms of fiction, and a portrayer of how individuals function within society. No
one other than Lessing is capable of writing about African landscapes, outer space, Sufism, nuclear
holocaust, Spanish rural poverty, a Hampstead political family, and cats, all within the same career.

Lessing will always be known as the writer of The Golden Notebook. It is hard now to comprehend
just how original it was in 1962; it is a very early work of British postmodernism, characteristically
British in that there is a strong realist centre. It reads partly, now, as an evocative social document
of the early 1960s; for many, it became a feminist novel, although Lessing was keen to point out
later that this was not what she intended. The business of this complex book is surely the inability
of traditional forms of fiction to portray the divided modern self, irrespective of gender; it is a story
of fragmented post-war life, told in a fragmented form. There is no centre and all is fiction; we
cannot trust what we perceive. If this is familiar to us in the writings of John Fowles and A.S. Byatt,
of Angela Carter and Graham Swift, this is because of the seeds sown by Lessing.

However Doris Lessing was a novelist long before The Golden Notebook, and there is an argument
for her early works being her best. The Grass is Singing (1950), her debut, succeeds as well as it
does because it is partly a thriller. Mary Turner, the central character, is dead at the start, and we
learn, by way of flashback, the explanation for her death. The evocation of the atrophied African
farm, the way that the environment sucks the life out of Mary, is superbly done. It is quasi-
naturalism, with an omniscient narrator to direct us to a fact which seems obvious now but was not
so then: the inbuilt racism of the colonials in southern Africa. Lessing continued this theme in a
series of short stories published in the early 1950s; the short story form is particularly suited to her
desire to use a particular incident to demonstrate a general truth, to explain us to ourselves via
fable. ‘The Old Chief Mshlanga’, ‘A Sunrise on the Veld’ and ‘Little Tembi’ are standouts. Lessing is a
masterful painter of the African landscape through deceptively simple language.

Martha Quest (1952), the first volume of the Children of Violence quintet, continues the African
setting and the portrayal of conflicting female desires in The Grass is Singing. If it is a less gripping
piece than its predecessors, it is because Lessing is already growing restless with form, and is
anxious to show a story about false starts and dead ends. It is capacious, and supposed to
frustrate: that is what life is like. The quintet as a whole is as famous and influential, perhaps, as
The Golden Notebook; its last volume, The Four-Gated City (1969), heralds Lessing’s most
adventurous years in fiction.

The boldest writers of English fiction have challenged realism and delighted in unsettling us, making
us work. Lessing, in her novels of the late 1960s and 1970s, takes us into mysterious inner worlds
and outer space, for political reasons. Dream can explain reality; alien worlds can explain the way
we live now. Science fiction, as written by Lessing, is a return to the worlds of Milton, Dante and
Blake, although today, in the words of Margaret Atwood, ‘aliens have taken the place of angels’. In
Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), a disintegrating post-apocalyptic world is contrasted with the
harmony of visions of the mind; in the ambitious Canopus in Argos series – ‘space fiction’, as
Lessing calls it – the author has found a new way of examining the individual’s relationship with
collective life. This is far removed from the popular view that science fiction is escapist
entertainment, and it is highly appropriate that the third volume, The Sirian Experiments (1981),
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Lessing regards the series as her finest work.

It is a mistake to try to pigeon-hole Lessing, but from the 1980s on she has returned to realism,
although always embracing fantasy and dystopian fiction along the way. A crafty experiment
resulted in Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and its successor If the Old Could (1984), published
under the name of Jane Somers. She wanted the fiction to be judged on its own terms; one
reviewer said the style reminded them of the young Doris Lessing. Set in the then-present day, the
novels are intelligent renderings of contemporary female experience, and particularly that of the
elderly woman. Also of interest is The Good Terrorist (1985), a ‘condition of England’ novel in which
London is decaying and in the grip of dangerous ideologies. Here, the personal is political, but our
personal desires can become swamped by politics; as ever, Lessing shows that love, for women,
works against their political and intellectual advancement. The novel reflects her various
disenchantments with feminism, communism and Marxism. This suspicion of ideology, which so
incensed many radicals, is to the fore in the great, late novel The Sweetest Dream (2001), which
replaced Lessing’s third volume of autobiography, and which saw reviewers compare her to Balzac
and George Eliot. The book convincingly encompasses the history of political and cultural ideas in
Britain from the 1960s to the end of the century; the corruption and poverty within Zimbabwe
(renamed Zimlia) is also ruthlessly exposed. She is unashamedly omniscient in her narration. Who
else but Lessing would write 'The beginning of the new feminism in the Sixties resembled nothing so
much as little girl at a party, mad with excitement … dancing about shrieking, “I haven’t got any
knickers on, can you see my bum?”. Who else would portray the political movement they once
supported drinking with “tender admiration” to Stalin, “possibly the cruellest murderer who has ever
lived” '? Lessing’s work is maddening, depressing, brave, and shakes us by the neck. Her most
recent two novels, The Cleft (2007), and Alfred and Emily (2008), show that she is still capable of
surprises every time. The Cleft imagines a prehistoric Earth populated only by females; Alfred and
Emily, by placing the true story of the effect of the First World War on Lessing’s parents alongside a
novella that gives them a happier life, implicitly debates the ethics and authority of fiction-writing,
rather like Ian McEwan does in Atonement. Clearly, Lessing is still a sibyl, and we hope she has not
finished yet.