Doris Lessing's first book, The Grass is Singing , was published in 1950 and was immediately recognized as a novel of outstanding promise. Most of her life up to the age of thirty was spent in Rhodesia and her first four novels and collections of stories all have African settings. Since settling in Britain she has shown that she possesses a far wider range of vision, as well as a remarkable versatility of technique. She is a writer of radical opinions, but has never allowed herself to become a doctrinaire: her humanitarian ...
Read More
Doris Lessing's first book, The Grass is Singing , was published in 1950 and was immediately recognized as a novel of outstanding promise. Most of her life up to the age of thirty was spent in Rhodesia and her first four novels and collections of stories all have African settings. Since settling in Britain she has shown that she possesses a far wider range of vision, as well as a remarkable versatility of technique. She is a writer of radical opinions, but has never allowed herself to become a doctrinaire: her humanitarian sympathies embrace the whole sweep of the relation of the individual conscience to the collective. Her African books are concerned not so much with diverse racial experience as instead with the specific perspective of the white milieu: 'her main business is with the white settlers she knows best', and her approach is often to contrast their natural and human imperfections with their position of political or technological advantage. The essay surveys at length her major five-volume novel cycle 'The Children of Violence' and its exploration of 'the ideological "feel" of the mid-century'. It also discusses her view of the closely interrelated problems of the responsibility of the writer, the life of the free woman, and the spiritual isolation of modern humanity: these themes infuse such books as The Golden Notebook and Briefing for a Descent into Hell . Lessing is a novelist of exceptional power who has never hesitated to apply her gifts to difficult or intractable material: above all, in Michael Thorpe's phrase, she possesses 'the unteachable quality of keeping the reader morally alive'. Michael Thorpe was Associate Professor of English in the University of Calgary, Canada. He was author of Morning in Ankara and other poems , By the Niger and other poems , and of critical studies on Matthew Arnold and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as editor of the latter's The Old Century . He has also edited A Choice of Clough's Verse and anthologies of modern prose and poems.
Read Less
Add this copy of Doris Lessing to cart. $5.00, good condition, Sold by Dunaway Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Saint Louis, MO, UNITED STATES, published by Published for the British Council by Longman Group.
Edition:
Published for the British Council by Longman Group
Add this copy of Doris Lessing (Writers and Their Work) to cart. $68.14, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1973 by Liverpool University Press.
