SOURCE: Bell, Millicent. “Possessed by Love.” Partisan Review 64, no. 3 (summer 1997): 486-88.

In the following review, Bell discerns a thematic departure in Love, Again from Lessing's typical treatment of love.

The title of Doris Lessing's latest novel [Love, Again] refers, most apparently, to her heroine's reluctant re-experience of emotions she had thought, at sixty-five, to have put well behind her. Sarah Durham finds that she can still burn with desire, writhe with sexual jealousy, grieve at love's frustration—and no less than when she was young. She is not ready for the acquiescence of Colette's Léa who lets herself go gently into loveless age in The Last of Chéri. The title also refers, I think, to Lessing's latest novel itself as novel, that literary form which includes so much besides a love story but often seems to express the whole of human destiny by means of a...