SOURCE: Hobbs, John. “Literature Is News That Stays News.” America 175, no. 18 (7 December 1996): 25-6.

In the following review, Hobbs evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Love, Again.

Doris Lessing, the noted British fiction writer best known for The Golden Notebook, has turned her attention to the unfamiliar subject of passion among the late middle-aged [in Love, Again]. Sarah, the central character of Lessing's first novel in seven years, is a 65-year-old widow with grown-up children. Her daily life revolves around her successful career as writer and administrator for an alternative London theater company called the Green Bird, which decides to produce a play based on the imaginary life of Julie Vairon, a recently rediscovered early feminist writer and composer who committed suicide in 1912. Not that she could be easily pigeonholed by contemporary feminists, since “for some she is the archetypal female victim, while others identify with her independence.”

If...