SOURCE: "A Dog's Life," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, Nos. 1-2, January 13, 1994, pp. 3-4, 6.
Ritvo is an American critic and educator whose works include The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). In the following excerpt from a review in which she also discusses the books The Hidden Life of Dogs (1994) by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Cats: Ancient and Modern (1993) by Juliet Clutton-Brock, she examines the revised version of Particularly Cats … and Rufus, arguing that Lessing implicitly criticizes "many of those who study animal behavior [and automatically treat anthropomorphism as a weakness that distinguishes the soft-headed and the simple-minded among humans."]
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