SOURCE: Merritt, Stephanie. Review of The Sweetest Dream, by Doris Lessing. New Statesman 130, no. 4557 (1 October 2001): 83.

In the following review, Merritt assesses The Sweetest Dream within the context of Lessing's later career.

By prefacing this vast novel [The Sweetest Dream] with an authorial disclaimer, Doris Lessing creates expectations that she then attempts to wave aside. She has decided not to write the third volume of her autobiography to follow Walking in the Shade, she explains, but her readers should not imagine that this book is a fictional substitute. Though The Sweetest Dream clearly is, to a degree, retracing the terrain of Lessing's life from the 1960s onwards, in London and, later, in Africa, she is somewhat disingenuously asking her readers not to peer too closely at the characters for a likeness of real people, including herself.

The sweetest dream of the title is a phrase to be considered sometimes...