Lessing, Doris 1919–

(Doris May Lessing, Jane Somers)

PERSONAL: Born October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia; daughter of Alfred Cook Taylor (a farmer) and Emily Maude McVeagh; married Frank Charles Wisdom, 1939 (marriage dissolved, 1943); married Gottfried Anton Nicholas Lessing, 1945 (marriage dissolved, 1949); children: (first marriage) John (deceased), Jean; (second marriage) Peter. Politics: "Left-wing."

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Jonathan Clowes Ltd., 10 Iron Bridge House, Bridge Approach, London NW1 8BD, England.

CAREER: Writer. Worked as a nursemaid, a lawyer's secretary, a Hansard typist, and a Parliamentary Commissioner's typist while living in Southern Rhodesia, 1924–49.

MEMBER: National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Modern Language Association (honorary fellow), Institute of Cultural Research.

AWARDS, HONORS: Somerset Maugham Award, Society of Authors, 1954, for Five: Short Novels; shortlisted for the Booker McConnell Prize, 1971, for Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1981, for The Sirian Experiments: The Report of Ambien II, of the Five, and 1981, for The Good Terrorist; Prix Medici Award for work translated into French, 1976, for The Golden Notebook; Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1981; German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize, 1982; Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award (Ditmars) nomination, 1982, for The Sirian Experiments; W.H. Smith Literary Award, 1986, Palermo Prize, 1987, and Premio Interna-zionale Mondello, 1987, all for The Good Terrorist; Grinzane Cavour award (Italy), 1989, for The Fifth Child; honorary degree, Princeton University, 1989, and Harvard University, 1995; distinguished fellow, University of East Anglia, 1991; XI Annual International Catalunya Award, James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize, University of Edinburgh, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, all 1995, all for Under My Skin; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for biography/autobiography, 1998, for Walking in the Shade; International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nomination, 2000, for Mara and Dann; David Cohen British Literary Prize, 2001; Asturias Prize for literature, Prince of Asturias Foundation, 2001; named Companion of Honour, Royal Society of Literature, 2001.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

The Grass Is Singing, Crowell (New York, NY), 1950, reprinted, Perennial Classics (New York, NY), 2000.

This Was the Old Chief's Country (stories), M. Joseph (London, England), 1952.

Five: Short Novels, M. Joseph (London, England), 1955.

Retreat to Innocence, M. Joseph (London, England), 1956.

Habit of Loving (stories), Crowell (New York, NY), 1958.

The Golden Notebook, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1962, with an introduction by the author, HarperPerennial (New York, NY), 1994.

A Man and Two Women (stories), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1963.

African Stories, M. Joseph (London, England), 1964, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1965.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Knopf (New York, NY), 1971.

The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 1972, published as The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories, J. Cape (London, England), 1972.

The Summer before the Dark, Knopf (New York, NY), 1973.

The Memoirs of a Survivor, Random House (New York, NY), 1975.

Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 1978, published in two volumes as Collected Stories I: To Room Nineteen and Collected Stories II: The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories, J. Cape (London, England), 1978.

(Under pseudonym Jane Somers) The Diary of a Good Neighbor (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1983.

(Under pseudonym Jane Somers) If the Old Could … (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1984.

The Diaries of Jane Somers (contains The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could …), Random House (New York, NY), 1984.

The Good Terrorist, Knopf (New York, NY), 1985.

The Fifth Child, Knopf (New York, NY), 1988.

The Doris Lessing Reader, Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.

The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992, published as London Observed: Stories and Sketches, HarperCollins (London, England), 1992.

Love, Again, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.

Mara and Dann: An Adventure, HarperFlamingo (New York, NY), 1999.

Ben, in the World (sequel to The Fifth Child), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2000.

The Sweetest Dream, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2002.

The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2004.

"CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE" SERIES

Martha Quest, M. Joseph (London, England), 1952.

A Proper Marriage, M. Joseph (London, England), 1954.

A Ripple from the Storm, M. Joseph (London, England), 1958.

Landlocked, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1966.

The Four-Gated City, Knopf (New York, NY), 1969.

"CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES" SERIES

Re: Colonized Planet Five, Shikasta, Knopf (New York, NY), 1979.

The Marriage between Zones Three, Four, and Five, Knopf (New York, NY), 1980.

The Sirian Experiments: The Report of Ambien II, of the Five, Knopf (New York, NY), 1981.

The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

Documents relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, Knopf (New York, NY), 1983.

Canopus in Argos: Archives (contains Re: Colonized Planet Five, Shikasta; The Marriage between Zones Three, Four, and Five; The Sirian Experiments: The Report of Ambien II, of the Five; The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight; and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire), Vintage (New York, NY), 1992.

NONFICTION

Going Home, drawings by Paul Hogarth, M. Joseph (London, England), 1957, with a new afterword, HarperPerennial (New York, NY), 1996.

In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1961, reprinted, 1996.

Particularly Cats, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1967, revised edition published as Particularly Cats—And Rufus, Knopf (New York, NY), 1991.

A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, Random House (New York, NY), 1975.

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Harper (New York, NY), 1987.

The Wind Blows away Our Words, Random House (New York, NY), 1987.

African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992.

Under My Skin (autobiography), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

Time Bites (essays), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2004.

PLAYS

Mr. Dollinger, produced in Oxford, England, 1958.

Each in His Own Wilderness, produced in London, England, 1958.

The Truth about Billy Newton, produced in Salisbury, England, 1961.

Play with a Tiger (produced in London, England, 1962; produced in New York, NY, 1964), M. Joseph (London, England), 1962.

Also author of a libretto based on The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, for an opera by Philip Glass.

OTHER

Fourteen Poems, Scorpion Press, 1959.

The Old Age of El Magnifico, Flamingo (London, England), 2000.

ADAPTATIONS: The Memoirs of a Survivor was adapted into a film and released in 1983; The Grass Is Singing was adapted into a film by Michael Raeburn and released as Killing Heat in 1984. The Diary of a Good Neighbour was adapted and directed by RenéFéret as the film Rue du Retrait, France, 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Doris Lessing, whose long career as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist began in the mid-twentieth century, is considered among the most important writers of the modern postwar era. Since her birth in 1919 in Britain's sphere of influence in Persia (now Iran), Lessing has traveled widely, in geographical, social, political, psychological, and literary terms. These travels, as expressed in her writing, offer readers insights into life at distant outposts of the British Empire and at its core. Through her books—including novels and short-story collections—one can encounter people buffeted by personal, historical, and political forces, and can explore the major issues of the age: racism, communism, feminism, terrorism, and the destruction of the environment. "Lessing has written prolifically on everything from British colonialism … to the failure of ideology," commented Gail Caldwell in the Boston Globe, adding that during her long career the versatile author has "taken on the apocalyptic potential of a futuristic, Blade Runner London, the perils of the color bar in Africa, [and] the life of a young girl growing up on the veld."

Lessing's wide-ranging literary appetite is one of the defining characteristics of her work; another is her style. "The Lessing sentence is blunt," explained Philip Hen-sher in the Spectator, "quickly veering from concrete facts to abstract nouns, tempted briefly by the possibilities of rhapsody, but always turning back to the urgency of the urban demotic…. Its cadences are punchy…. she loves the grand, dramatic force of words like wisdom, and the vivid simplicity of the names of colours." "Critics have found it extremely hard to categorize Lessing," observed Fiona R. Barnes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "for she has at various stages of her life espoused different causes and been labeled over again."

In 1924 Lessing's father took the family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), hoping to make a fortune growing corn and tobacco and panning for gold. The family found little fortune on its new farm, located in a remote corner of the Rhodesian bush not far from the border with Mozambique. However, in her years growing up in the African wild, her stays in convent and government schools, and her brief career as a secretary and homemaker, Lessing found a wealth of literary inspiration. As Mark Mathabane noted in the Washington Post Book World, "The formidable problems of racial, social and economic injustice besieging the region of her formative years, its wondrous beauty and unfulfilled promise, left a permanent imprint on her. They molded her artistic temperament, politics and loyalties and made of her a highly original and activist writer." In 1949 Lessing left Africa behind for London, the heart of the British empire. She also left behind most of her family: her brother, her two failed marriages, and her two children from her first marriage. With her son from her second marriage, she embarked on a new life in London as a writer. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published the following year.

Like many of the novels and short stories that would follow its debut, The Grass Is Singing deals with settings, characters, and issues very close to its author's experience of Rhodesian society and its government's apartheid policies. The central character of the novel is Mary Turner, the wife of a farmer in the African bush, whose affair with an African servant ends in her mur-der. "Mary Turner is a strange, sad woman, suffering under the burden of obligations imposed upon her as a white woman by the sad, strange conventions of a colonial settler society," explained K. Anthony Appiah in the New Republic, the critic going on to add that "the novel is intensely humane in its attentiveness to the minutest details of the mental life of this central character." In the opinion of New York Review of Books contributor J.M. Coetzee, this book represents "an astonishingly accomplished debut, though perhaps too wedded to romantic stereotypes of the African for present-day tastes." At the time of Lessing's debut in 1950, however, Appiah observed, "reviewers pronounced her the finest new novelist" since World War II.

Lessing's major and most controversial novel is The Golden Notebook, first published in 1962, wherein she brilliantly explores, as a New Statesman reviewer noted, what it is like to be "free and responsible, a woman in relation to men and other women, and to struggle to come to terms with one's self about these things and about writing and politics." Lessing once explained that the work is "a novel about certain political and sexual attitudes that have force now; it is an attempt to explain them, to objectivize them, to set them in relation with each other. So in a way it is a social novel, written by someone whose training—or at least whose habit of mind—is to see these things socially, not personally." In its structure, the novel is really two novels, divided in four sections and "The Golden Notebook." Lessing split it into four parts in order to "express a split person. I felt that if the artist's sensibility is to be equated with the sensibility of the educated person, then it is logical to use different styles to express different kinds of people." She felt that the "personality is very much what is remembered; [the form] enabled me to say to the reader: Look, these apparently so different people have got so-and-so in common, or these things have got this in common. If I had used a conventional style, the old-fashioned novel,… I would not have been able to do this kind of playing with time, memory and the balancing of people…. I like The Golden Notebook even though I believe it to be a failure, because it at least hints at complexity."

After her initial flourishing as a writer, during which time she explored the Africa of her youth from her new home in London, Lessing turned away from the land of her past and toward new settings: inner space and outer space. Briefing for a Descent into Hell is a novel of ideas based on her interest in the views of British psychiatrist R.D. Laing. In subsequent novels, Lessing has continued to produce work critiquing modern society.

In contrast to the realism that marked her earlier novels, Lessing's work of the late twentieth century—particularly her science-fiction series "Canopus in Argos: Archives"—would take startling new forms. In the five "Canopus" books she explores the destruction of life brought about by catastrophe and tyranny. Paul Schlueter in the Dictionary of Literary Biography noted that in this series Lessing's "high seriousness in describing earth's own decline and ultimate demise is as profoundly apocalyptic as ever."

Following her foray into science fiction, Lessing again surprised readers and critics by publishing two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers. The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could … contain typical Lessing themes: relations between women, the question of identity, and psychological conflict. Though Lessing was able to get the "Somers" books published in both England and the United States, they were generally ignored by critics and did not sell well. Lessing finally admitted that the works were her creation, saying that she had used the pseudonym to prove a point about the difficulties facing young writers. Without adequate marketing and publicity, noted Lessing, books by unknown writers are generally doomed to oblivion.

More recent fiction by Lessing includes The Good Terrorist, a satirical novel about romantic politics; The Fifth Child, a 1998 novel about a violent, antisocial child who wreaks havoc on his family and society; and Love Again, a reflection on the agonies and insufficiency of romantic love. Commenting on Love Again in the New Yorker, Brooks Appelbaum maintained that the book is "really about the sawdust sensation of knowing that one's darkest despair and brightest ecstasy have been felt and expressed before, and better; and that ultimately, their expression doesn't help." The book's protagonist, an older woman, dissects "her love and grief with the ruthless precision of a forensic pathologist" in passages that "radiate the analytical purity that has always been Lessing's greatest strength."

A sequel to The Fifth Child published over ten years later, Ben, in the World continues the story of middle-class Britisher Ben Lovatt, who has been treated as an outsider since birth due to his primitive, savage physique. Now eighteen, the muscular but apelike Ben looks much older than his age; with little education and fearful of society, he nonetheless flees his uncaring family for Brazil, where he attempts to come to terms with his savage spirit in a harsh world. Noting that the novel's plot borders on "bathetic melodrama," a Publishers Weekly contributor nonetheless commended Lessing for her efforts to show "how intellectuals acting in the name of art or science cruelly exploit simple people who can't defend themselves." Viewing the novel more positively in her Christian Century review, Trudy Bush called Lessing's approach a "fresh twist" on a traditional theme, and added that readers of Ben, in the World will never again "see those who are radically different from themselves in quite the same way."

Considered a semi-autobiographical novel, Lessing's The Sweetest Dream takes place during the 1960s and focuses on Julia, a widow living in a house in Hampstead who takes in her daughter-in-law and young grandsons after her son abandons his family in favor of the Communist Party. Due to the young mother's generosity, Julia's house is soon second home to a host of interesting characters, some of whom take advantage of the situation. In another part of the novel, a fictional African nation called Zimlia suffers through decolonization, and another political fiction is discredited as the new leaders show themselves to be as ruthless as their colonial predecessors were. In its examination of political systems gone awry and what Booklist contributor Donna Seaman dubbed the "sweet utopian dream of communism that went so nightmarishly wrong," Less-ing's novel maintains what New Criterion contributor Paul Hollander called "a compelling focus on the timeless tension between idealistic social-political aspiration and the dark side of human failure…. As Lessing shows, 'the sweetest dream' … will likely continue to haunt and elude us." Calling Lessing "one of the great imaginative fantasists of our time," Spectator reviewer Hensher praised The Sweetest Dream as "loose, absorbing, urgent" in its focus on "the future of society and personal responsibility." Seaman praised the the work as "a realistic tour de force," adding that "the force of Lessing's vast knowledge and wisdom and the vigor and vision of her imagination and conviction are felt on every page."

The Grandmothers, Kirkus Reviews claimed, demonstrates that the "84-year-old author … still boasts a range and power few writers half her age can muster." In the title story Lessing explores a relationship between two women and their sons which if not taboo is extremely unusual. Digby Durrant wrote in the Spectator that "Lessing thinks the only sin committed by the grannies was to be discovered." "In 'A Love Child,' an ex-soldier longs to know the child he is sure he fathered on a brief reprieve from the horrors of World War II," Amy Ford observed in Library Journal, adding that Lessing is in top form in these stories. "In 'Victoria and the Staveneys,' a poor black child longs for a room of her own," Hazel Rochman noted in Booklist. Although she found the stories too lengthy, she was struck by "beautiful individual sentences [that] stop you with their startling insight." "The Reason for It" describes a future society in decline from the viewpoint of a leader, much in the manner of The Memoirs of a Survivor or the Canopus in Argos series. Claire Messud writing in the New Statesman commented that "Lessing has cultivated a briskness, an impatience with certain niceties of narrative: years pass in a single sentence, characters are sketched swiftly, almost hastily, and their most radical alterations are recorded in a few words. This conversational brusqueness is not displeasing."

Lessing has also produced nonfiction tomes, including The Wind Blows away Our Words, about war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. A nonfiction work and two volumes of autobiography marked her eventual return to her African homeland and to the preoccupations of her youth. After leaving Southern Rhodesia in 1949, Lessing had returned only once, in 1956, an experience she recounts in Going Home. After this first homecoming, the white minority government blocked any future returns because of Lessing's criticism of apartheid. It was not until the 1980s, after years of civil war and thousands of deaths brought the black majority to power in the newly christened Zimbabwe, that Lessing could return. In African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe she chronicles her trips to southern Africa in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992. On one level, this book offers the keen observations of a new nation's growing pains through the eyes of someone not an insider but not an outsider. She sees first a country trying to come to terms with the outcome of a long and bloody civil war based on race. In subsequent trips, she finds exuberance, corruption, and finally decline. "One is oneself fixed in the beam of Lessing's penetrating gaze from the first moments of the book," wrote Appiah.

In African Laughter, according to Mathabane, "Lessing gives us one of the most penetrating and evenhanded critiques of Zimbabwe as a new nation." Her "portrait is without stereotype or sentimentality," the critic added, "and free of the overbearing shadow of South Africa and its larger-than-life problems of apartheid." For Appiah, however, Lessing's insights into the changes taking place in Zimbabwe are not complete because, as a white woman, she is unable to get inside the hearts and minds of blacks. "Lessing shows us only the exterior of the black Zimbabweans," he pointed out, "but still we are in her debt for what that view teaches us about what is happening in Zimbabwe." In Appiah's final analysis, "What we learn from this book, then, is not so much the political history of Zimbabwe in its first dozen years, but the psychic history of Southern Rhodesia, the inner history of the white settlers and what has become of them: the best of this book is the white man's story."

Under My Skin, the first volume of Lessing's autobiography, follows the writer from her birth in 1919 to 1949, the year she left Southern Rhodesia for London and her life as a single mother and aspiring writer. She recounts her very early years in Persia, the railway journey across a chaotic Soviet Russia, the promising voyage to Africa, and the years in the bush and in convent school. She also describes the lives of the Taylor family, their fellow whites, and the African majority around them. Under My Skin "is not so much a recollection of her early life in Southern Rhodesia as a dissection of it," commented Martha Duffy in Time; "The chapters on childhood are marvelously, sometimes frighteningly, detailed." Roberta Rubenstein commented in Chicago's Tribune Books that "Under My Skin makes for compelling reading because of Lessing's vivid reconstructions of decisive experiences and significant people of her childhood. Throughout, she juxtaposes descriptions of events that occurred in her youth—before she was capable of fathoming them—with her current unsentimental judgments of them." Although this is autobiography, it is Lessing, true to her strengths as an observer and writer. Duffy concluded: "Set down in blunt, fluent prose, it is the same mix of the practical and the speculative that marks all her writing. And, alas, the same lack of humor. But if that is a flaw, it also ensures the author's total engagement with any subject she tackles. That is what one reads Doris Lessing for: unsparing clarity and frankness." Walking in the Shade, the second Lessing autobiography, covers life in London from her arrival in 1949 to the publication in 1962 of The Golden Notebook, which secured her reputation as a major postwar English writer. Much of the book deals with Less-ing's love/hate relationship with the Communist Party, which she joined in 1952—"the most neurotic act of my life," she once wrote—and stuck with it for nearly twenty years despite deep misgivings. "Her … description of the Cold War years, the potent mixture of arrogance, emotionalism and naivety that kept her and others tied to the Party line, long after they knew it was nonsense, will not be bettered," wrote Anne Chisholm in the Times Literary Supplement. The book also recounts Lessing's disastrous love affairs, her struggles as a single mother with little money in grim, tattered postwar London, her writing habits, her relatively rapid entry into the city's intellectual circles, and her perceptions of the famous—and eccentric—who moved in those circles. Chisholm found the book to be "not Less-ing's best-written or best-constructed book; it is repetitive, and the more gossipy sections have a perfunctory air, as if added under pressure from her publishers. But even its flaws testify to her seriousness of purpose." Walking in the Shade is "stingingly self-mocking," according to Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker; it "is about the admission of colossal, sickening error and defeat." But "it is surely Lessing's ability to hold fast to her goal even as she records every stumble and collapse along the way which has made her work of near-inspirational value to so many."

According to Mathabane, "whatever her subject, Lessing is a surefooted and convincing storyteller. Her work possesses a universality, range and depth matched by that of few other writers in our time." As Schlueter remarked of her career, Lessing's "work has changed radically in format and genre over the years,… and she has been more and more willing to take chances fictionally by tackling unusual or taboo subjects…. And while it is commonplace to note that Lessing is not a stylist, that she is repetitive, and that her fiction too easily reflects her own enthusiasms at particular moments,… the fact remains that she is among the most powerful and compelling novelists of our century."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Arora, Neena, Nayantara Sahgal and Doris Lessing: A Feminist Study in Comparison, Prestige Books/Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies (New Delhi, India), 1991.

Barr, Marleen and Smith, Nicholas D., editors, Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1983.

Bertelsen, Eve, editor, Doris Lessing, McGraw-Hill, 1985.

Bigsby, C.W.E., The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, Junction Books, 1981.

Bloom, Harold, editor, Doris Lessing, Chelsea House Publishers (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.

Brewster, Dorothy, Doris Lessing, Twayne Publishers, 1965.

Brigg, Peter, The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction: A Critical Study of a New Literary Genre, McFarland & Co. (Jefferson, NC), 2002.

Bücher, Britta, A Wordless Statement: Die Rolle der Darstellung in Doris Lessings Space-fiction, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2002.

Budhos, Shirley, The Theme of Enclosure in Selected Works of Doris Lessing, Whitston Pub. Co. (Troy, NY), 1987.

Cederstrom, Lorelei, Fine-tuning the Feminine Psyche: Jungian Patterns in the Novels of Doris Lessing, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1990.

Christ, Carol P., Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1980.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 6, 1975, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 22, 1982, Volume 40, 1986.

Dandson, Cathy N., and E.M. Brown, editors, The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, Ungar (New York, NY), 1980, pp. 207-216.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959, 1983, Volume 139: British Short Fiction Writers, 1945–1980, 1994.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1985, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Draine, Betsy, Substance under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1983.

Ezergailis, Inta, Woman Writers, the Divided Self: Analysis of Novels by Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Doris Lessing and others, Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann (Bonn), 1982.

Fahim, Shadia S., Doris Lessing: Sufi Equilibrium and the Form of the Novel, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Fishburn, Katherine, The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in Narrative Technique, Greenwood Press (Westport, CN), 1985.

Galin, Müge, Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1997.

Gardiner, Judith Kegan, Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy, Indiana University Press (Bloomington), 1989.

Greene, Gayle, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1994.

Hite, Molly, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1989.

Holmquist, Ingrid, From Society to Nature: A Study of Doris Lessing's "Children of Violence," Gothenburg Studies in English, 1980.

Ingersoll, Earl G., editor, Doris Lessing: Conversations, Ontario Review Press (Princeton, NJ), 1994.

Ingersoll, Earl G., editor, Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964–1994, Flamingo (London, England), 1996.

Kaplan, Carey and Rose, Ellen Cronan, editors, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1988.

Knapp, Mona, Doris Lessing, Frederick Ungar, 1984.

Kums, Guido, Fiction, or The language of Our Discontent: A Study of the Built-in Novelist in Novels by Angus Wilson, Lawrence Durrell, and Doris Lessing, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1985.

Laurenson, Diana, editor, The Sociology of Literature: Applied Studies, University of Keele Press (Newcastle on Tyne, England), 1978.

LeFew-Blake, Penelope, Schopenhauer, Women's Literature, and the Legacy of Pessimism in the Novels of George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, and Doris Lessing, Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston, NY), 2001.

Martinson, Deborah, In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction, Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 2003.

Michael, Magali Cornier, Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1996.

Myles, Anita, Doris Lessing: A Novelist with Organic Sensibility, Associated Publishing House (New Delhi, India), 1991.

Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg, Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing, Greenwood Press (West-port, CN), 1999.

Pickering, Jean, Understanding Doris Lessing, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1990.

Pratt, Annis, Dembo, L. S., editors, Doris Lessing: Critical Studies, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1974.

Rigney, Barbara H., Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in Brontë, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1978.

Robinson, Sally, Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1991.

Rose, Ellen Cronan, The Tree outside the Window: Doris Lessing's Children of Violence, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1976.

Rowe, Margaret Moan, Doris Lessing, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Rubenstein, Roberta, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness, University of Illinois Press (Urbana), 1979.

Sage, Lorna, Doris Lessing, Methuen, 1983.

Saxton, Ruth, and Jean Tobin, editors, Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Schlueter, Paul, The Novels of Doris Lessing, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1973.

Seiler-Franklin, Carol, Boulder-Pushers: Women in the Fiction of Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, and Iris Murdoch, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1979.

Seligman, Dee, Doris Lessing: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Greenwood (Westport, CT), 1981.

Shapiro, Charles, editor, Contemporary British Novelists, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1964.

Short Story Criticism, Volume 6, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Singleton, Mary Ann, The City and the Veld: The Fiction of Doris Lessing, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 1977.

Sprague, Claire, and Tiger, Virginia, Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1986.

Sprague, Claire, Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill), 1987.

Taylor, Jenny, editor, Notebooks, Memoirs, Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing, Routledge & Kegan Paul (Boston, MA), 1982.

Thorpe, Michael, Doris Lessing's Africa, Evans Bros (London, England), 1978.

Whittaker, Ruth, Doris Lessing, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Yelin, Louise, From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1998.

Yuknavitch, Lidia, Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writing of War in Twentieth-century Fiction, Rout-ledge (New York, NY), 2001.

PERIODICALS

America, December 7, 1996, p. 25.

Antioch Review, fall, 1996, p. 493.

Ariel, July, 1995, p. 176.

Belles Lettres, summer, 1993, p. 30.

Book, May, 2001, p. 86; January-February, 2002, Penelope Mesic, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 63.

Booklist, November 15, 2001, Brad Hooper, review of The Grass Is Singing, p. 555; December 1, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 605; November 15, 2003, Hazel Rochman, review of The Grandmothers, p. 548.

Boston Globe, July 29, 1992, p. 62; October 16, 1994, p. B18; November 13, 1994, p. B1.

Choice, April, 1995, p. 1298; October, 1995, p. 292; March, 1997, p. 1167.

Christian Century, December 13, 2000, Trudy Bush, review of Ben, in the World, p. 1313.

Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1992, p. 13; November 17, 1994, p. 14.

Critique, spring, 2002, p. 228.

Economist (United Kingdom), December 22, 2001, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 117.

Frontiers, June, 2001, Roberta Rubenstein, "Feminism, Eros, and the Coming of Age,", pp. 1-20.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 24, 1984; April 6, 1985; December 21, 1985; August 6, 1988.

Hudson Review, spring, 2001, Alan Davis, review of Ben, in the World, p. 141.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2003, review of The Grandmothers, p. 1246.

Library Journal, February 1, 2002, Beth Anderson, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 131; November 15, 2003, Amy Ford, review of The Grandmothers, p. 100.

London Review of Books, April 22, 1993, p. 22.

Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1983; July 6, 1983; May 10, 1984; January 14, 1988; June 25, 1992, p. E12; October 20, 1994, p. E8; December 8, 1994, p. E1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 1, 1981; March 21, 1982; February 10, 1985; October 13, 1985; October 20, 1985; March 27, 1988; April 6, 1988; November 1, 1992, p. 2; September 5, 1993, p. 6.

Maclean's, January 9, 1995, p. 66; April 15, 1996, p. 64.

Modern Fiction Studies, summer, 1975; spring, 1980; spring, 1996, p. 194.

Modern Language Quarterly, March, 1974.

Nation, January 11, 1965; January 17, 1966; June 13, 1966; March 6, 1967; November 7, 1994, p. 528; May 6, 1996, p. 62; October 13, 1997, p. 31.

New Criterion, March, 2003, Paul Hollander, review of The Sweetest Dream, pp. 71-76.

New Republic, June 28, 1993, p. 30.

New Statesman, April 20, 1962; November 8, 1963; October 31, 1997, p. 43; October 1, 2001, Stephanie Merriman, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 83; December 8, 2003, Claire Messud, review of The Grandmothers, p. 52.

Newsweek, October 14, 1985.

New York, October 26, 1992, p. 96.

New Yorker, June 10, 1996, p. 88; November 17, 1997, p. 108; February 18, 2002, Louis Menand, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 193.

New York Review of Books, December 22, 1994, p. 51; April 18, 1996, pp. 13-15.

New York Times, October 21, 1972; October 23, 1979; March 27, 1980; January 19, 1981; January 29, 1982; March 14, 1983; April 22, 1984; October 5, 1984; October 23, 1984; July 14, 1985; September 17, 1985; March 30, 1988; June 14, 1988; June 16, 1992, p. C16; November 2, 1994, p. C1.

New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1971; May 13, 1973; June 4, 1978; November 4, 1979; March 30, 1980; January 11, 1981; February 2, 1982; April 3, 1983; September 22, 1985; January 24, 1988; April 3, 1988; April 12, 1992, p. 13; October 18, 1992, p. 13; November 6, 1994, p. 1; April 21, 1996, p. 13; September 14, 1997, p. 16.

Partisan Review, spring, 2002, Anthony Chennells, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 297.

Publishers Weekly, September 19, 1994, p. 47; May 29, 2000, review of Ben, in the World, p. 46; January 21, 2002, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 63; November 17, 2003, review of The Grandmothers p. 40.

San Francisco Review of Books, number 3, 1992, p. 25.

Spectator, October 31, 1992, p. 38; October 22, 1994, p. 48; April 20, 1996, p. 42; October 18, 1997, p. 55; September 1, 2001, Philip Hensher, review of The Sweetest Dream, p. 33; November 15, 2003, Digby Durrant, review of The Grandmothers, p. 51.

Time, October 1, 1984; October 7, 1985; November 21, 1994.

Times (London, England), March 19, 1981; June 2, 1983; August 12, 1985; October 7, 1985.

Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 1979; May 9, 1980; April 17, 1981; April 2, 1982; June 3, 1983; September 13, 1985; May 8, 1987; October 17, 1987; April 22, 1988; December 18, 1992, p. 8; December, 2, 1994, p. 11; April 5, 1996, p. 27; December 5, 1997, p. 6.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), October 30, 1979; April 27, 1980; January 24, 1982; September 29, 1985; January 31, 1988; March 20, 1988; July 26, 1992, p. 3; January 3, 1993, p. 3; October 23, 1994, p. 1.

USA Today, December 1, 1994, p. D9.

Village Voice, January 4, 1973; October 2, 1978.

Washington Post, September 24, 1984; October 1, 1984; October 24, 1984; June 11, 1992, p. B2; December 29, 1994, p. C1.

Washington Post Book World, October 21, 1979; November 4, 1979; April 6, 1980; January 25, 1981; March 21, 1982; April 24, 1983; September 22, 1985; March 20, 1988; April 19, 1992, p. 15; January, 10, 1993, p. 5; October 16, 1994, p. 14; March 31, 1996, p. 7.

Women's Review of Books, March, 1995, p. 11; October, 1996, p. 11; November, 1997, p. 5.

World Literature Today, spring, 2002, Charles P. Sarvan, review of The Sweetest Dream, pp. 119-120.

World Literature Written in English, November, 1973; April, 1976.

ONLINE

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