In the following essay, Franko examines "Lessing's ambivalent attitude toward canonical authorities" by focusing on the ways in which the narrators of her novels and short stories—including The Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and "The Sun Between Their Feet"—use and view language.

In the following essay, Fishburn contends that Lessing's novels are highly complex, subtly self-conscious "metafictions" and that "Lessing has never truly been the realist (we) critics thought her … [she only masqueraded as one."]

In the following essay, Tyler asserts that Virginia Woolf and Lessing use the Demeter myth “in their fiction to subvert the traditional heterosexual romance plot.”

In the following essay, Harvey disavows the influence of Lessing's “One off the Short List” on Leo Bellingham's “In for the Kill.”

In the following essay, Gohrbandt compares the use of fable elements in the African stories of Lessing and Bessie Head.

Appiah is an English-born American critic and educator who has written extensively on philosophy, literature, and African culture. In the following largely positive review of African Laughter, he discusses some of the major themes of Lessing's work, namely her depiction of "the moral intricacy of human life."

In the following essay, Tiger considers the relationship between Lessing's short fiction and her longer works through a reading of two of her short stories: “To Room Nineteen” and “A Room.”

In the following essay, Pickering explores the related themes of the stories in African Stories and her novel The Grass Is Singing.

In the following review, Miller and Showalter compare Walking in the Shade to Under My Skin, examining Lessing's literary achievements, particularly her contribution to feminist scholarship.

In the following essay, Rowland contrasts Lessing's early political and artistic conceptions of “representation” with the thematic implications of Canopus in Argos.

In the following essay, Halisky finds parallels between the female protagonists in Gail Godwin's “A Sorrowful Woman” and Lessing's “To Room Nineteen.”

In the following essay, Sceats examines the representation of eating and food in Lessing's writing, particularly in terms of their role in interpersonal or social relationships.

In the following essay, Hotchkiss provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Lessing's African stories.

Tiger is a Canadian critic and educator. In the following essay, she focuses on Lessing's short stories "To Room Nineteen" and "A Room" in her discussion of the author's use of narrative voice and realistic literary techniques. Tiger also examines the ways in which these two stories relate to the novels Lessing constructed from them, The Summer Before the Dark and The Memoirs of a Survivor, respectively.

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

Coetzee is a South African novelist, critic, essayist, and translator. In the review below, he offers a summary of Lessing's life and career, remarking on Lessing's thoughts concerning feminism, politics, sexuality, and her mother.

In the following review, Chettle details the plot of Mara and Dann, with particular attention to Lessing's characterization of the protagonist within the context of feminist realism.

Pritchard is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he remarks on the theme and style of Under My Skin and summarizes Lessing's development throughout her literary career.

In the following interview, Lessing discusses her observations on feminism, the 1960s, fame, and spiritual fads, as well as her thoughts on privacy, death, and the end of the twentieth century.

In the following essay, Tyler examines Lessing's short story "Among the Roses" from a feminist perspective, elucidating its mother-daughter theme in relation to the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone.

The Summer Before the Dark is Doris Lessing's most misunderstood novel. If taken at face value, the novel lacks depth and substance. This has led some critics to term the book a fable, or an allegory for our time…. Many of the problems disappear when the critic realizes that Lessing is extending the mode she used so successfully in portions of her earlier novels, that of satire. A comparison of the tone, the images, and the terms of Kate's self-discovery with those of Lessing's e...

[Briefing For a Descent Into Hell] seems to me to be an important synthesis of central aspects of The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City and in some ways to constitute [Lessing's] most mature vision thus far of the ultimate nature of human experience. (p. 193) To center initially on the question of mental disturbance is natural enough for both reviewer and reader; after all, Charles is a patient at a mental hospital throughout the novel. But to remain centered on this aspect of it, or on the rel...

In the following review, Simon contrasts the protagonist and themes of Ben, in the World with those of The Fifth Child.

Doris Lessing's immense and unwieldy five-volume series, The Children of Violence, chart a spiritual journey from a woman's perspective. Though Lessing's intention was to write about a generation, in choosing Martha Quest as the heroine of her story she made women's experience central in it. Martha's quest begins in an experience of nothingness. It is uniquely shaped by her experience of motherhood, and her guide on her journey is another woman, Lynda, through whom Martha ...

In the following review, Powers refutes several widespread critical opinions of Walking in the Shade.

[Doris Lessing] believes (with many others) that our civilization is slipping ever-faster toward the precipice. Almost from the beginning, her work has explored what in human nature is causing this catastrophe and what, if anything, can be done about it. (p. 9) Lessing's attention is always turned toward humanity's destructive weaknesses and potential strength, and it is essentially these that I have called the two cities and the veld. For Lessing, the African veld is the unconscious, physical...

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 au...

In the following review, Grossman examines the narrative structure of Love, Again.

In the following review, Hensher compares The Sweetest Dream to the style and narration of Lessing's previous works.

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

In the following review, Clark faults Lessing's characterization and prose style in Mara and Dann.

In the following review, O'Faolain assesses the themes, motifs, and characterization in Love, Again.

In the following essay, Bell delineates the color imagery in “To Room Nineteen.”

In the following essay, Nordius regards T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as an important subtext in “To Room Nineteen.”

Moorehead is an English journalist and nonfiction writer. In the following review, she praises Under My Skin for its vivid and evocative depiction of Rhodesia and for the insights the book offers into the relationship between Lessing's life and fiction.

In the following review, Kakutani praises Lessing's evocation of Africa and colonial life but laments that the author's self-portrait is "an incomplete one, filled with rationalizations and evasions."

An English novelist and historian, Davidson is a prominent scholar in the field of African history. In the following review, he remarks favorably on Under My Skin.

Although Doris Lessing has more in common with George Eliot than she has with any contemporary serious-novelist, she is not always above solemnity, as opposed to mere seriousness. Somewhat solemnly, Lessing tells us in the preface to her new novel Shikasta that there may indeed be something wrong with the way that novels are currently being written. She appears not to be drawn to the autonomous word-structure. On the other hand, she is an old-fashioned moralist. This means that she is inclined to take very ...

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

[Lessing] reads like a nineteenth-century novelist with a twentieth-century sensibility, exercising a generously detailed, old-fashioned realism to delineate modern types (professionals, hippies, housewives) and modern dilemmas (women's place in society, third-world diplomacy, class mobility). All this Lessing gives without the strait jacket of ideology, for although she was involved in radical politics for years, she believes above all in fidelity to the human complications of her originals…....

In the following excerpt, Kalnins outlines the narrative structure of Walking in the Shade, briefly describing Lessing's career.

An American critic, Eder has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In the following review, he laments that "Lessing proclaims but does not convey the wretchedness" of her early life in Under My Skin.

In the following positive review of The Real Thing, Bemrose singles out "The Pit" as "the collection's finest story."

In the following review, Sampson highlights the passion of Lessing's memories in Walking in the Shade.

In the following excerpt, Davis admires the Realist tendencies of Ben, in the World, particularly in the descriptions of the material world.

Spanning [Doris Lessing's] entire career, [African Stories] includes every story she has written about Africa, from her earliest collection to the most recent…. Even in her first, This Was the Old Chief's Country, the stories are astonishingly mature and consistent, three among them having an enduring, diamond-hard quality. "The Old Chief Mshlanga" hinges on the awakening of responsibility in a sensitive, adolescent girl when her attention is abruptly focused on the human ...

In the following review, Newson describes the plot and narrative elements of Love, Again.

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

In the following review, Knapp focuses on the heroine's role in the narrative development of Mara and Dann.

In the best stories in her new collection, A Man and Two Women, Miss Lessing has developed her feminism and her concern for contemporary issues into a … subtle and profound point of view. "To Room Nineteen," for example, does not simply depict the "failure in intelligence" that the opening line indicates. Rather, it is a meaningful story about a personal failure in marriage that represents a failure of the relationship between man and woman in our society. The woman, Susan...

In the following review, Brandon focuses on the theatrical setting, style, and implications of the central theme of Love, Again.

It is not Mrs. Lessing's fault that, among the many secrets she knows, her knowledge of women's anger and aggression, even more than of their sexuality, took people by surprise and categorized her. That is the fault of our times and of history. But ["Stories"] should repair any misunderstanding of her timelessness, the breadth of her sympathy and range of her interests and, above all, the pleasures of reading her. Rereading these stories is like returning to a Victorian novel one...

[The Memoirs of a Survivor] is about the future, where now the "ordinariness of the extraordinary" has taken hold. Yet in the chaos of this imagined future, in the hiatus between two eerily unspecified disasters, Lessing takes a definite, if disillusioned, stand on a number of issues she has made vital before: the lot of women, sexual relations, the problem of community, the problem of social behavior and personal morality, the price of maturity, the plight of the individual. For Lessing, this...

In the following review, Newson explores the parallels between African Laughter and Lessing's experiences in Africa.

In the following review, France highlights the fable-like characteristics of the plot of Ben, in the World.

On the basis of this book alone, Doris Lessing must be counted as one of the most important fiction writers of our times. African Stories includes every story Miss Lessing has written about Africa, that continent whose "tragedy must play itself slowly out," but they are also about every continent where people are human and helpless. Miss Lessing's style is a traditional one, unmarked by hysteria or hurry. She has a remarkable gift for good beginnings, and the tension in her stories is t...

The nineteen pieces which go to make up A Man and Two Women are the work of an original and scrupulous artist. Mrs. Lessing's writing is all her own. She owes little to modish theories or to popular experimenters. She sets herself a creative task and worries away at it in an absorbed, painstaking way. Sometimes her objective seems unrewarding and you wonder why she chose it. Can the stage-designer Barbara Coles, for example, and her novel tactics with seducers really be worth all the trouble Mrs. Les...

I was worried about Doris Lessing's Martha Quest series, partly because the heroine was treated with so conscientious a harshness, so honorable a lack of self-indulgence that she gave the impression of being a repellent person; and partly because the discipline of an overtly political framework destroyed a great deal of the writer's intuitive flexibility. With these short stories, under the title The Habit of Loving, I am no longer in any doubt whatsoever that Mrs Lessing is one of the best wr...

In the following excerpt, Bush offers a description of the protagonist in Ben, in the World.

In Pursuit of the English is a completely misleading title, suggesting as it does an updated England, Their England (a job that, incidentally, badly needs doing.) Mrs Lessing does bring up to date one or two characters from Ze Mad English rep. company—the comic landlady and the comic colonel—but she is in fact concerned with some rather untypical people in a rather untypical house. Even on these terms, the book is vaguely unsatisfactory. There is nothing wrong with any of the characters as suc...

There has always been an element of didacticism, of using the novel as a vehicle for instruction, in [Doris Lessing's] work; and those who admire the elegance and freedom of her short stories—in which this element is absent—may feel that it spoils much of the Children of Violence sequence, especially the later, London-based, books: too much earnest argument, the sound of too many axes being ground, a ponderous solemnity. Perhaps this is not fair comment; Mrs Lessing is a political novel...

[Stories] offers Lessing's most characteristic voices, moods, preoccupations. Stories such as "The Habit of Loving," "The Other Woman," "A Man and Two Women," "How I Finally Lost My Heart," reveal by their titles the emphasis on the remorses and dislocations of desire. The tone is never strident, often acutely ironic (though rarely humorous), as Lessing details the subtler losses attendant upon growing up, growing old, shedding the illusions of ...

In the following review, Zaleski observes parallels between Lessing's life experience and the narrative of The Sweetest Dream.

In the following review, Bick assesses the sexual dimension of Love, Again.

Complex character creation, spell-binding plot-spinning, delicate character interplay, bright dialogue—none of these has been regarded as Mrs. Lessing's forte in earlier novels, and Memoirs of a Survivor, alas, is no exception. In those earlier writings, her choice of fiction as a vehicle for her ideas seemed almost accidental and perhaps irrelevant. Her weaknesses as a novelist were beside the point since, despite them, she was an intellectually stimulating, philosophically provocative social...