SOURCE: Miller, Jane, and Elaine Showalter. “Doris Lessing and the Millennium.” Raritan 18, no. 1 (summer 1998): 133-51.

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.

Doris Lessing was born in 1919, so she will soon be eighty. It is hard to believe. She is the author of at least forty-five books: novels, stories, plays, poems, and nonfiction, and in just the last three years she has published a novel and two volumes of autobiography and is rumored to be enthusiastically working on an adventure story at this very moment. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which she brought with her to London from Southern Rhodesia, where she grew up, was published in 1950, so she has been a well-known and active writer for forty-seven years.

You have to start from this productiveness, energy...