SOURCE: Tyler, Lisa. “Our Mothers' Gardens: Doris Lessing's ‘Among the Roses’.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 2 (spring 1994): 163-74.

In the following essay, Tyler examines the troubled mother-daughter relationship in “Among the Roses.”

Doris Lessing has long demonstrated in her work a love-hate relationship with women's magazines, which he seems to regard as contemporary equivalents of conducts books: repressive, didactic works that stress conformity to tired gender roles and celebrate frivolity at the expense of thought. Ella, the fictional figure that Anna creates in The Golden Notebook, works for Home and Hearth; its parodically conventional name perhaps suggests a certain disdain on Anna's part, and quite possibly Lessing's. Lessing is more openly scornful in Play with a Tiger. When Harry taunts Tom with the prospect that his new job will entail “administering to the spiritual needs of the women of the nation through the ‘Ladies Own’ [sic]” (13), Tom responds...