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Introduction

In her writing career, spanning more than half a century, Doris Lessing (1919–) conveys a sense of crisis in the world she lives in, at the same time expressing great hope for humanity. Her awareness of disastrous violence and her sense of modern history’s share in it inspired her to give her series of autobiographical novels the title

“Children of Violence.” Undoubtedly, her keen and uncompromising insight into the time she lives in was one of the main reasons why she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. In the Presentation Speech at the award ceremony, Per Wästberg expressed his belief that Lessing’s books are “textbooks in 20th-century behavioural patterns” and through reading them we can “discover the way many thought – or thought wrongly – during one of history’s most turbulent periods as war succeeded war, colonialism was unmasked and communism in Europe conquered.” Lessing, who is “a relentless witness of her time,” “grasps our reality like a grubby root vegetable, uncovering experiences we did not realize we could access.”Certainly, his remarks are indicative of Lessing’s tenacious and sometimes simple, but always lucid and thorough, exploration of her world and time.

My thesis explores how Lessing has, throughout her writing career, been challenged by and grappled with the modern world – as Wästberg suggests – and how much of her attitude towards art, life, and time she owes to the earlier writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). It is by looking at Lessing’s works through the perspective provided by her predecessor that their undercurrent becomes clear, allowing us to break new ground in reading her texts. Woolf inscribed in her writing the marks of her

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struggle with the modern surroundings of the early twentieth century, preparing the ground for Lessing’s own attempts to capture her world and the spirit of her time – or, to borrow Lessing’s phrase, the “world-mind.” While Woolf was born and grew up in the upper-middle class in London, a metropolitan centre, Lessing came from the lower-middle class in Southern Rhodesia, a peripheral colony in Africa. However, in spite of their temporal and geopolitical distance, they share similar ideas and perspectives about the experiential world and employ ostensibly different yet highly compatible narrative strategies as a means of representing it.

This thesis will investigate this aspect of the two writers’ narratives, in order to make new discoveries regarding Lessing’s work. To borrow Michael Tratner’s phrase,

“Woolf wants novel reading to contribute to the fragmenting of public social reality so that a new assemblage can be made” (Tratner 132); this new assemblage is something the reader makes – approaching human reality as something inseparable from personal memory or collective history. Lessing inherits and develops this narrative strategy and perspective, producing – in the context of the second half of the twentieth century – diverse forms of the novel which cannot (as Wästberg mentions) be easily classified into any genre. History, in their sense, is less the events that happened and were completed in the past, and more something that is repeatedly re-constructed from – that threatens, and fuses with – the present. History, in this conception, is necessarily fragmented, fluid, and always in process. Furthermore, both Woolf and Lessing see history from the perspective of women, who have been denied their place in official history; in other words, it is in part the marginality of the woman’s position itself that makes them refuse to be encapsulated in the linear and chronological history framed by patriarchal discourse.

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The aim of this introduction is to show the contexts in which the writing careers of Lessing and Woolf unfolded. First I will present their writing – especially Lessing’s – together with its critical history, focusing on the critical comparison of the two writers on the literary scene. Then, I will highlight the two presuppositions through which this thesis explores the two writers’ work: first, their shared perspective regarding both modernity and the relationship between memory and reality; second, the way in which the First World War, or Great War, affects their texts. My argument will also make extensive reference to the impact of Africa on Lessing’s writing; that is, the way in which Lessing’s experience in Africa constitutes a persistent foundation for her peculiar thought. Finally, I will summarise the content of each chapter and the connections between them.

The Writing History of Lessing and Woolf

Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah in Persia (now Iran) in 1919. She was the first child of Alfred Cook Taylor and Emily Maude McVeagh, both of whom belonged to the British lower-middle class. Alfred, her father, had lost his left leg in the Great War, and met Emily, her mother, when she was working as a nurse in the Royal Free Hospital.

In 1924, after the War was over, Alfred – not satisfied with his job in the Persian Bank – decided to move with his family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to become a farmer. This was the beginning of Lessing’s African life, which spanned twenty-five years. Although I will describe it in greater detail later, it is worth providing a brief sketch of her experience in Africa here. Her official education ended due to an eye disease at the age of fourteen, but she continued studying books that her mother obtained from England. Her extensive reading provided her with fertile ground for her

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later involvement with literature.

Two of the most influential factors on her life in Southern Rhodesia were its colonial society and the natural environment that surrounded her. As a self-governing British colony, Southern Rhodesia enforced the Land Apportionment Act in order to overcome the recession induced by the Depression. As I will explain in more detail later on – in my discussion of The Grass Is Singing in Chapter 3 – this notorious act, based on a principle of racial discrimination, usurped the ownership of most of the African land in favour of the small but privileged white population and exploited the native people as cheap labour. Lessing witnessed, and was directly involved in, this relationship between coloniser and colonised in the context of this peripheral colony.

Her absorption in the untamed natural world, together with her life in colonial society, became the core of her thought and mentality – themes to which I will return later in the thesis.

After Lessing had married and been divorced twice, she went back to London in 1949 with her third and last child, carrying the manuscript of her first novel – The Grass Is Singing – which became a great success. Living in London ever since, she has written many further books: by 2008 she had completed over twenty novels, twenty collections of short stories, and nine works of non-fiction including essays, reports and autobiographies – many of which have been translated into other languages for her worldwide readership.

Though Lessing has written more than forty books and still continues to write now, some critics believe that she is a writer whose career peaked in the 1950s and 1960s.Unsurprisingly, in light of the author’s productivity and importance, Lessing’s work has inspired a wealth of literary criticism from both inside and outside Britain. It

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is worth summarising the general tendencies of this criticism. Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was a great success because it was a “propitious time for the novel to be published in England” (Klein 130). Furthermore, the novel coincides with the taste of the postwar period which witnessed “the revival of the liberal and realist novel”

(Bradbury 10). In addition to its elaborate structure and lucid prose, its colonial subject matter was generally welcomed by critics in postwar British society. The cultural and political new-wave of the 1950s required new talent, with people wanting to know what was actually going on in the colonies in the face of increasing immigration from the ex-colonies into Britain. Lessing’s subsequent collection of short stories set in Africa, This Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951), was also welcomed for the same reasons. Lessing then published Martha Quest (1952) – the first of a series of autobiographical novels in the “Children of Violence” collection, the second of which is A Proper Marriage (1954), and the third A Ripple from the Storm (1958).

In the interval between the third “Children of Violence” novel and the fourth, Landlocked (1965), Lessing published one of her most controversial masterpieces – The Golden Notebook (1962), which I will discuss at length in Chapter 3. Lessing herself declares in the preface to the second edition – published nine years after the first – that the novel’s aim is to show “the intellectual and moral climate” of the time “in the way Tolstoy did it for Russia, Stendhal for France” (Lessing, Preface 10-11). However, as she complains in the same preface, it was the aspect of the “sex war” (8) in the novel that attracted most attention, whilst the dimensions of politics and mental illness attracted less.

After having written four realistic novels in the “Children of Violence” series, Lessing suddenly adopted the mode of apocalyptic literature in the fifth and last book of

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the series – The Four Gated City (1969) – where nuclear war destroys the whole of Britain, and yet a hope for the future survives in Africa. Subsequently she has written novels of various forms, styles, and themes – or to put it more precisely, novels which cannot be placed in any one genre as Wästberg mentions above. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), the dream of a male, schizophrenic classical scholar at Oxford University is delineated in detail, whilst the conversations with his doctors that occur in the real world are defamiliarised through the employment of italics. The Summer Before the Dark (1973) explores a similar parallel between the protagonist’s dreams or illusions and her actual life, whilst The Memoir of a Survivor (1974) – which I will examine in Chapter 4 – offers a similar juxtaposition of the heroine’s life in her apartment and an alternative world beyond the wall of her living room. In the late 1970s Lessing began a series of space fictions – the “Canopus in Argos: Archives” – the first volume of which is Re: Colonised Planet Five: Shikasta (1979), in which the earth and its inhabitants are just a tiny and decaying part of a much larger cosmos.

At this stage critics and readers began to accuse Lessing of abandoning realism (Gąsiorek 84); for them throwing aside realism meant escaping from social reality and the social responsibility that she had previously asserted in her essay “The Small Personal Voice” (1957). Defying these adverse criticisms, however, Lessing did not cease to transgress genre boundaries – producing novels that defy categorisation in one literary genre, as well as those that could broadly be called realistic. In the meantime, criticisms from a wide range of perspectives – including psychoanalysis, Marxism, mysticism or Sufism, and post-colonialism – have appeared.

Around 2000 a relatively new critical approach started to emerge, insisting that in order to grasp Lessing’s spirituality “one must consider her work as a whole” (Hunter

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and McIntosh 109).10 Literary critics in the twenty-first century have also begun to look back at the more general currents of English literature in the previous century, positioning writers in the context of both the collapsing of the British Empire and the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Jed Esty’s Shrinking Island (2004) looks at literary history from the early to mid-twentieth century from the perspective of the Empire’s decline, re-examining Lessing as a member of a group of mid-century colonial writers who, almost typically, came from peripheral colonies and both embodied and responded to the cultural and social upheaval in postwar England. He accentuates the critical turn in England around the Second World War from metropolitan universalism to minor culturalism. Describing this as an anthropological turn, he defines Lessing’s In Pursuit of the English (1960) as a good example of a book that pursues England or Englishness not as an exclusive entity of the metropolitan centre but as a minor culture among many others.

Although I want to refer to Esty’s judgment on Lessing again in Chapter 3, I will focus on another dimension of Lessing’s cultural experience as well in this thesis.

Lessing was brought up and stayed in Africa for a quarter of the twentieth century, and her experience there leaves an indelible trace in her works. At the same time, it still seems undeniable that her way of embracing the experiential world is not only idiosyncratic but also implicated in something which I believe to have originated in groundwork that Woolf had laid a few decades earlier; the traces of Woolf’s engagement are inscribed in Lessing’s work, as I will discuss shortly. By identifying this inscription by Woolf we can perceive an undercurrent of Lessing’s creativity.

As for Woolf’s critical legacy, although she had already attracted much attention from critics during her lifetime – because of her innovative use of narrative form,

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impressionism, and stream-of-consciousness11 – critics have continued to focus on her writing after her death in 1941, approaching it from various angles. In the 1940s, immediately after her death, Q. D. Leavis disputed her controversial Three Guineas – which I will consider in Chapter 2 – for its prejudices regarding gender. Perhaps one of the most influential reviews in the period is Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which I will refer to in Chapter 3.

Acknowledging Woolf as one of the pioneering writers of the modern era, he points out that in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, even in minute personal details like the act of measuring the stocking, “realistic depth is achieved”; that is, “what happens in that moment . . . concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also . . . concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common” (552).12

Perhaps one of the most outstanding of Woolf’s reviewers in the 1960s was Jean Guiguet, a French critic; his monograph, Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962;

translated by Jean Stewart 1965), remained for a long time a monumental work within Woolf studies. Quoting frequently from A Writer’s Diary, he provides a philosophical examination of Woolf from the perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. He suggests, inferring from the ambiguous outline of Woolf’s characters, that she is a

“purely psychological writer” (253), and that materialist or historicist readings of Woolf’s writing are not appropriate.

Henri Bergson’s philosophy, which I will describe during Chapter 1, has long been held as one of the key conceptions used to interpret Woolf’s writing. Already in Woolf’s lifetime, Floris Delattre laid the foundation for the longstanding strain of Bergsonian interpretation in relation to Woolf, publishing Le Roman Psychologique de Virginia Woolf (1932); it was followed, in 1962, by Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the

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Stream of Consciousness Novel. Now it seems that the number of direct references to Bergson might be fewer, and yet his theory survives in the interpretations of reviewers who are much influenced by Bergson, such as Benjamin or Deleuze, or in postmodern theory. That fact differentiates Bergsonian ideas from the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ahistorical interpretation of Woolf does not garner much attention now.

One of the other long-lasting and important strands of Woolf criticism is feminism. Beginning with Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (1932),

“one of the earliest to discuss Woolf’s feminist politics” (Goldman 128), feminist interpretations of Woolf have persisted for a long time – sometimes affiliated with psychoanalysis, mythopoeisis, materialism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Above all, materialist feminism laid down its marker in the 1980s with the essays in Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing (1979), or Jane Marcus’ Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (1988). Feminism’s struggle with postmodernism was shown in Toril Moi’s Sexual/Texual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985); while Moi questions Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, a materialist feminist, she upholds the new French feminist group – including Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray – whose theories, Moi insists, are suitable for examining Woolf’s texts. This intimate relationship between French feminism and Woolf’s criticism persists even now.13

In the 1990s Woolf criticism came to be incorporated into new historicism, cultural materialism, or postcolonialism. Stimulated by these tendencies, a lot of books on Woolf have appeared that attempt to investigate Woolf and her works with regard to modernity, capitalism, science and technology on the one hand, and to empire, the World Wars, and fascism on the other. Many of the critical writings that I will quote in the thesis belong to this new genre, since one of the aims of my thesis will be to explore

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how Woolf reacted to modernity. She responded acutely to the emerging technology that made possible the unprecedented terrors faced by modern society – namely, the two World Wars and fascism, each of which made possible only by taking advantage of new technology. Many modernist writers struggled with modernity and shared a deep anxiety about the devastation of the world; yet what distinguishes Woolf from canonical male modernists such as T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, is that she eventually did not oppose the standardised and denatured life of the masses – or rather, she found hope in it. Perhaps she in some ways welcomed the rupture of human perception by technology as an impetus for a revolt against the conception of linear history, which she believed was connected to patriarchy and masculinity. It is this rupture of human life and the resulting fragmentation of a fixed reality which Woolf incorporates into her narrative strategy, and which Lessing inherits a few decades later.

In terms of critical comparisons between Woolf and Lessing, their affinity was indicated already as early as the 1960s. In exploring doubled subjectivity, Claire Sprague argued in 1962 that Lessing’s female double, Anna/Molly, resembles Mrs.

Ramsey/Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse and the female/male double, Anna/Saul, resembles Clarissa/Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway (82). Also, the headless corpse of the African ant-eater in The Golden Notebook is, she indicates, “reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s similarly mutually destroyed snake and toad in Between the Acts” (74). Paul Schlueter admits in his 1969 monograph, The Novels of Doris Lessing, that Virginia Woolf is “cited as a possible influence on Mrs. Lessing” (19), though he judges D. H.

Lawrence’s influence on Lessing to be more tangible.14

In 1994 the first and hitherto only collection of essays on the relationship between the novels of Woolf and those of Lessing was published, titled Woolf and Lessing:

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Breaking the Mold, in which eight critics argue about the correlation, difference, and kinship of the two writers from the perspective of the female subject, the shift from modern to postmodern subjectivity, topography, the mother-daughter relationship, and creativity. For example, Linda E. Chown suggests that Lessing and Woolf share

“strikingly similar antipathetic response to organized psychology,” enumerating four characteristics of their fiction which disclose this tendency of theirs (124). Claire Sprague here discusses “[m]ultipersonal and dialogic modes in Mrs. Dalloway and The Golden Notebook” (3), as the title of her essay indicates. Christine W. Sizemore tackles urbanity in the works of Woolf and Lessing, referring to their common “standpoint of alienation to observe the city” as the “‘outsider-within’ standpoint” (61).

Of the essays in Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, Magali Cornier Michael’s

“Woolf’s Between the Acts and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: From Modern to Postmodern Subjectivity” is the one that is closest to the theme of my thesis; or rather, to the argument I will make concerning Between the Acts in Chapter 2. As I will argue later, her definition of modern and postmodern subjectivity and the oscillation between these two subjectivities are useful and appropriate in explicating the shared perspectives regarding the individual in the texts of Lessing and Woolf.

Since this collection of essays, the connection between Woolf and Lessing has not received much attention. In 1999 Roxanne J. Fand declares, in her monograph The Dialogic Self: Reconstructing Subjectivity in Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood, that “Doris Lessing, like Virginia Woolf, cycles and recycles the impersonal through her personal experience as a woman. Her work takes up where Woolf’s leaves off around mid-twentieth century” (96).15 Debrah Raschke writes, in her 2001 essay “‘It won’t be fine’ tomorrow: Doris Lessing’s Struggle with Woolf”, that Woolf’s shadow is cast over

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Lessing’s Fifth Child; she argues that To The Lighthouse in particular haunts Lessing’s text, as I will describe in greater detail during Chapter 5. Tonya Krouse, in her essay

“Freedom as Effacement in The Golden Notebook: Theorizing Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Authority” from 2006, admits the unavoidable impact of Woolf on Lessing’s text, saying that “[c]ritics have concentrated most extensively on Lessing’s The Golden Notebook as a response to the oeuvre of Virginia Woolf. This should not surprise us”

(49). Krouse nevertheless adds that “I also believe that her response is perhaps more equivocal than some critics would like to admit,” paying attention to the kinship of Lessing’s text to D. H. Lawrence, and further, to James Joyce (50-1). In 2007 Aaron Rosenfeld, comparing Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with Lessing’s Memoir of a Survivor, refers to Lessing’s response to Woolf in terms of urban representation; he mentions that

“by redirecting naturalistic conventions inward, she [Lessing] answers Woolf’s complaint about the absence of ‘woman’ from history, conflating private and public history into a unified field of exploration” (12). Although his topographical approach is different from mine, some of his descriptions are inspirational; these are, to show two instances, that “Woolf’s novel privileges the fluidity of being – the present interrupted by the past, the fullness of the immediate perception lost to the division of language”

(10) and that “despite its ‘personal,’ autobiographical themes, Memoir of a Survivor also suggests that the personal is inseparable from the external and political . . .” (11). As I will show later, these reviews are inscribed in my thesis, whether directly or indirectly.

The shared perspective of Woolf and Lessing

One of the aims of my thesis is to explore how Woolf and Lessing react to the new forms of modernity brought by the twentieth century; Woolf reacted especially to

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the emerging technology that made mechanical reproduction possible and drastically transformed human perception. She also reacted to the new forms of terror in modern society, such as fascism and the new methods of warfare that took advantage of modern technology. Unlike many modernist writers, as I have already suggested, Woolf more or less accepted the rupture in human perception caused by technology as an opportunity for destabilising the established conception of linear history, which she understood to be profoundly embroiled with patriarchal and masculine discourse.

Lessing inherits Woolf’s sense of the fragmentation of a fixed reality and develops it in her own narrative strategy; whereas their actual narrative modes are extremely different, the same narrative perspective – or the attitude of using their narrative mode to break the established framework of reality and create a new assemblage – is common to both. This shared narrative perspective centres around three main points. Firstly, both writers try not only to capture the intertwined relationship between modernity and humanity, but also to locate it within the broad span of history.

In the modern world human perception is always forced to transform itself in response to such factors as the development of capitalism, science and technology; furthermore, the concomitant violence empowered by technology is rife all over the world. Both writers see this modernity as part of human history, or even of a history beyond humanity. Moreover, they do so from a woman’s point of view. Perhaps their female perspective allows them to show through their texts the inseparability of domains – the public and the private, or the individual and the collective – which have conventionally been divided hierarchically.

Secondly, in part because of the critical connection of the two spheres, both women writers represent the individual as a metonym for the collective they belong to.

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For them both the individual and the collective are neither fixed nor autonomous, but fluid and interactive, and often liable to fuse with each other.16 Therefore, every individual is inescapably but unwittingly implicated in the movement of the collective, in which what Lessing calls the world-mind, or spirit of the time, is embodied. When she states in the preface to the second edition of The Golden Notebook that she wanted to capture the moral climate of the time, this climate of the time is almost synonymous with the concept of the world-mind. Recollecting the days when she was writing The Golden Notebook in Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949-1962, she muses:

For I do think, whatever I failed at, or succeeded in, it is an honest and truthful and reliable account of how we all were at that time. It could not be written now, because a novel has to come out of some matrix of atmosphere, or feeling, or thought, and now that all seems so remote. It is hard to believe they happened, ‘all those old times.’ (346)

Here she suggests that no one could be immune to “some matrix of atmosphere, or feeling, or thought,” and further, the novel could be produced out of this matrix; that is why she thinks it “could not be written now.” World-mind, or the spirit of the time, or what she sometimes calls Zeitgeist, is this whole current of ideas, thoughts and atmosphere which slips into the individual’s unconscious as well as conscious mind.

Thirdly, Woolf and Lessing – consonant with their fusion of the individual and the collective – both obscure the boundaries between life and art, truth and fiction. Art, or the aesthetic, resides in ordinary people and everyday life rather than the higher echelons of culture. As the border of life and art is uncertain for them, so is that of truth and fiction. If the word “fiction” is conventionally allocated as the opposite to the word

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“truth,” then “truth” is also ambiguous for both writers since it is deduced from a memory whose fixed authenticity they are sceptical of. Their doubt about the validity of memory is quite intense, to the extent that they seem to see even their autobiographical writing as a kind of fiction. Woolf and Lessing conceive that memory is always in the process of becoming, being re-constructed from the present, invading the present, and fusing with the present. It is then natural that they should see history in the same way – as an accumulation of memory. History is never the finished past event; human reality for them is always intertwined with, inspired or haunted by history.

This sense of memory, truth, reality and history is fundamental to our understanding of the writing of Woolf and Lessing. When Woolf digs “beautiful caves”

behind people in Mrs. Dalloway, it is this human history that permeates the caves. In the case of Between the Acts, it is not only human history but also the history of the earth that pervades and resurrects itself repeatedly throughout the novel. Similarly, Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is saturated with anxiety and fear about the history of mankind’s civilisation. The Memoir of a Survivor also bears the burden of both the personal and collective history of 1960s England, against the background of the near-future. In The Fifth Child, time immemorial is mingled with the Victorian Age as resurrected in a British family of the 1980s. Even when the two writers deal with the individual, he or she is never a self-contained autonomous existence, but rather a metonym of the collective who cannot avoid carrying the collective history within him/herself. History in this sense is not divided chronologically. Like memory, mentioned above, history for these writers never ceases to be in process – re-created from and encroaching upon the present. To borrow Hassan’s remarks, “history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future. We are all . . . a little Victorian, Modern, and

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Postmodern, at once” (Stevenson 86). Consequently, the reality of the here-and-now we live in is actually the conglomeration of these intertwined memories, or histories. We are living entangled with recursive history.

The title of the thesis, “a sense of recursive history,” indicates this sense of ever-fleeting and never-fixed history; if memory, truth, and reality are always in the flux of human interactivity, and if each human is a metonym of the collective, human history could never be stable, nor be compartmentalised or set in order. When humans live with their own memory as a product of interpenetrative movement, and when any single event in history cannot stand as independent, it would not be possible for history – as an accumulation of memory – to stay fixed. As a whole human history repeats itself not only in the individual mind but also in the spirit of the time; that is the way in which

“[w]e are all . . . a little Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern.”

This sense of recursive history differentiates Lessing from other contemporary writers, female or otherwise. Amongst these A. S. Byatt, fifteen years younger than Lessing, offers a conception of memory or reality that forms a notable contrast to Woolf’s or Lessing’s. Therefore the inscription of Woolf’s creativity in Lessing’s text is itself a small instance that testifies to recursive history. Byatt declares that she is markedly influenced by Iris Murdoch, born in the same year as Lessing. In the introduction to Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch, Byatt explains her own and Murdoch’s idea of reality by quoting from the latter’s essay, “Against Dryness.” In order to pursue the “opacity of persons” and draw the “real impenetrable human person,” Murdoch dismisses “facile ideas of sincerity” and respects the “hard idea of truth” – naming the former “the self-centred concept of truth” and the latter “the other-centred concept of truth.” Taking this “other-centred concept of truth” as one of

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her principles in writing, Byatt insists that a writer should have “detached curiosity” and

“distance from the object” to avoid postmodernist solipsism. Beneath this conception of truth lies their common idea of language; Byatt agrees with Murdoch’s and Wittgenstein’s metaphor in which language implies a net woven of social, cultural, and historical significations which hinders our access to the reality that lies underneath it.

What distinguishes Woolf’s and Lessing’s conception of memory or reality from Byatt’s is their doubt regarding the binary opposition of self/other and the fixed nature of truth or reality. Self and other for them are never detached nor static; there are no clear boundaries between persons, but only the movement that their interactive contact produces. As a consequence, reality is for them always shifting through the process by which humans live, rather than lying underneath a net of language. In effect, Byatt declares that her attitude as a writer is “against the nouveau roman or the ideas of Virginia Woolf about life as a series of impressions seen through a luminous halo”

(“The Pleasure of Reading” 127-32: original italics). Likewise, John Beer points out Woolf’s tendency towards “an objectivizing of reality” and “a disinclination to recognize that her experiences may after all be subjective, projected on to the external world” (Beer 113). However, Woolf never “objectivizes” reality nor refuses to admit the subjectivity of her experience; possibly the subjectivity of her experience is too self-evident – in the same way that Lessing claims “there was no way of not being intensely subjective” (Lessing Preface 12-13: original italics) – but it remains the case that she cannot experience anything without her own self. Since neither Woolf nor Lessing regards the notion of the objective-subjective polarity as conceivable, reality or truth do not exist for them as detached entities.

Referring to Woolf’s remarks, Lessing engages with this epistemological problem

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of experience, memory, and reality in her short essay, “Writing Autobiography”:

The reason why people feel uneasy and disturbed when their lives are put into biographies is precisely because something that is experienced as fluid, fleeting, evanescent, has become fixed, and therefore lifeless, without movement . . . . Memory isn’t fixed: it slips and slides about. It is hard to match one’s memories of one’s life with the solid fixed account of it that is written down. Virginia Woolf said that living was like being inside a kind of luminous envelope. I would add to that ‘inside a moving, flickering luminous envelope, like a candle flame in a draught.’ (92)

Both Woolf and Lessing, in my view, have been trying to convey this “fluid, fleeting, evanescent” experience through language that inevitably distorts it; they know that the attempt is never perfectly achieved, and yet they seek a way to destabilise as much as possible “the solid fixed account of [experience]” by way of their narrative strategies.

While Woolf often comments on this aspect of memory or reality in such essays as “Sketch of the Past” and “Modern Fiction,” where she communicates her sense of human life, Lessing often talks about memory or reality in her interviews and essays – searching for a way to express the complicated and interacted relationship between experience, reality, and fiction. She has continued to delineate this motif in a variety of forms throughout her writing career, in contrast to Woolf’s relatively coherent narrative style.

Lessing refers to Woolf’s work on a number of occasions. As a matter of fact, Lessing indicates the narrowness of Woolf’s experience as an upper middle-class woman in London, as I will detail in Chapter 3. Furthermore, in her 2003 essay,

“Carlyle’s House: Newly discovered pieces by Virginia Woolf,” she criticises the

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character of Woolf in the movie, The Hours, complaining “[w]here is the malicious spiteful witty woman she in fact was?” (23). Nevertheless, she pays homage to Woolf in the same essay, since “[w]hat Virginia Woolf did for literature was to experiment all her life, trying to make her novels nets to catch what she saw as a subtler truth about life,”

and further, Woolf’s styles are “attempts to use her sensibility to make of living the

‘luminous envelope’ she insists our conscious is, not the linear plod which is how she saw writing like Bennett’s” (23-4). Ultimately Lessing thinks highly of Woolf, to the extent of acknowledging that “without [Woolf], without James Joyce . . . our literature would have been poorer” (24).17

Lessing, then, does not limit the influence on her own writing to a single author.

Considering her perspective with regard the relationship between individual and collective, or the recursiveness of personal and collective history, it is natural that she declares:

I’d read all of Lawrence and Virginia Woolf of the moderns . . . . The thing is I read so much then, you see. Because I was very isolated, I read day and night. Luckily I read very fast. It’d be very hard to say what influenced me and what didn’t. (Conversations 127)

If Lessing and Woolf are metonyms of the collective and if history recurs, as I will detail later, Lessing is unwittingly affected by many of her predecessors and many contemporary writers. Still, it deserves attention that she admires Woolf’s ability to

“make her novels nets to catch what she saw as a subtler truth about life,” which I think represents an attitude similar to Lessing’s own.

The Great War

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Both writers are keenly aware of the time they live in, as I have maintained above, and they seem to share a strong sense of crisis against the background of the contemporary bloodshed, especially the unprecedented technological warfare of the First World War. It would seem natural that Woolf – who herself lived through that war – reacts poignantly to the aftermath of the Great War, describing in Mrs. Dalloway the war’s stigma that endured beneath the surface of everyday life. I want to highlight here, however, that Lessing also experienced the Great War, in the sense that it remains an ineradicable inscription in her mind throughout her life.

If Lessing is “a relentless witness of her time,” as Wästberg suggests, her starting point for watching the world can be traced back to her own birthday. She elucidates this in her first autobiography, Under My Skin, published in 1994, that:

I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard, and people were dying in millions all over the world – that was important. How could it not be? Unless you believe that every little human being’s mind is quite separate from every other, separate from the common human mind. An unlikely thing, surely.

That war does not become less important to me as time passes, on the contrary. (Under My Skin 8)

The knowledge that her birth is haunted by this world-wide catastrophe persists tenaciously in her writing – or rather, her concern about it has grown stronger, as she herself admits. She also mentions in this book that in 1990 she visited towns and villages that were once battlefields of the Great War, feeling shattered by the “war memorial, with the names of the dead of World War One” which was “[a]ll over Europe, in every city, town, and village” (9). She then went to Scotland and northern England

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and saw the same scene; in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Liverpool are the “[r]ecords of that slaughter, the First World War. Unlived lives. Unborn child,” which makes her lament “[h]ow thoroughly we have all forgotten the damage that war did Europe, but we are still living with it” (9).

One of the most influential factors on her enduring interest in the Great War is her father’s – an ex-soldier’s – repeated story-telling on the subject. Though he had been, before the war, a cheerful young man who used to dance, swim, sing, and enjoy billiards, ping-pong, and picnics, Lessing declares in her essay “My Father” that “the best of my father died in that war, that his spirit was crippled by it” (86). Before the War her father, Alfred, believed in the propaganda that the War was “to end all wars.” After surviving from the War with his left leg amputated from the thigh, Alfred felt betrayed by his own country, and was depressed by the incongruous gap – like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway – between the returned soldier and civilian society; this discrepancy is a theme I will return to in Chapter 1. Alfred repeatedly related his disillusioned yet inerasable memories of the War to his first child, Doris:

His childhood and young man’s memories, kept fluid, were added to, grew, as living memories do. But his war memories were congealed in stories that he told again and again, with the same words and gestures, in stereotyped phrases. They were anonymous, general, as if they had come out of a communal war memoir. (“My Father” 87)

It would seem that Alfred told his daughter his memories so frequently that Lessing no longer distinguished her late father’s indignation from the indignation of people involved in the War as a whole. It is little wonder, however, that Alfred’s memory seems to be “general,” seems to derive from “a communal war memoir,” if the individual is a

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metonym of the collective – as I have suggested to be Lessing’s belief. Moreover, the fact that she asks herself if the anger she listened to from her father is his anger, or her own anger – wondering, “[b]ut whose anger is it?” (Under My Skin 372-3: original italics) – might imply a process in which her mind is occupied by her father’s memory regardless of her actual absence from the experience.18 To borrow Marlene A. Briggs’

remarks, “historical trauma marks the life cycle of individuals and generations” (4); that is to say, “historical and social conditions, even those mediated to an individual across geographical distances and temporal divides, may impact subjective experience in profound ways” (4).

Lessing’s lifelong contemplation on the Great War is evident in her latest, and purportedly last, book – Alfred and Emily, published in 2008. In the novella embedded in the first half of the book, Lessing resurrects her parents’ unlived lives in the way that

“they might have been had the Great War not happened” (Foreword viii). Thus her concern about her parents’ shattered lives never seems to fade out but even gets stronger.

It seems both strange and natural to Lessing that her memory is from the outset always located in her parents’ experience, prompting her to say in her aforesaid autobiography – Walking in the Shade – that “there is a pattern in my mind, there must be, where order breaks into disorder and extremity. It came from World WarⅠand my parents’

destruction by it. This pattern has to be in other people’s minds, must be, for we are not sufficient to ourselves” (268-9).

Lessing’s recurrent resurrection and interpretation of her parents’ memory as it is inscribed in her mind offers a relevant testimony to the phenomenon of recursive history; or rather, her sense of sharing historical trauma with her parents, and so with a number of other people, illuminates her belief that memory or experience should be

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acquired beyond temporal and corporeal boundaries. In this respect Lessing experienced, through the story-telling of her father, the Great War whose stigma Woolf conveyed through Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway.

Lessing’s Africa

Lessing’s experience in Africa has a considerable influence on her perspective, perhaps no less than the impact of her father’s memory of the Great War. Writing a number of short stories set in Africa, she also published novels reflecting her African background. While her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, is obviously based on her life on an African farm, her masterpiece – The Golden Notebook – has as a heroine a woman writer whose first novel is set in the Africa she once lived in. In the five autobiographical volumes of the “Children of Violence” series, the protagonist Martha Quest, who struggles with her social surroundings in Africa in the first four volumes, moves – like Lessing – to London in the last one, The Four Gated City; when the nuclear bomb explodes at last in England, however, it is in Africa that Martha and others find hope for the future. After a few decades, during which Lessing wrote mostly novels not set in Africa, she produced Mara and Dann and its sequel, The Story of General Dann and Mara’s daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, set in an Africa thousands of years on from now.

The extreme inequality in the hierarchal colonial society that she witnessed during her life in Africa made her a communist, as Lessing herself declares in her first autobiography.19 Yet, presumably, another two factors in African life also contribute to the tour de force of Lessing’s writing; they are the geopolitical position of her younger life in Africa on the one hand, and the irrational yet inviolable effect of nature there on

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the other.

I have referred to Esty’s conception of an “anthropological turn” through which a critical change happened in England, shifting – concomitant with the Empire’s contraction – from metropolitan universalism to minor culturalism. This minor culturalism, however, might be regarded as inherent in Lessing, who grew up in a peripheral colony and only saw – as a girl or a young woman – the metropolitan centre from the margins for the twenty-five years till she came to London in 1949. In the title of the third volume of “Children of Violence,” Ripple from the Storm, the “storm” is a metaphor for the Second World War – a title that connotes her only having experienced a “ripple” of the War, rather than being sucked into the whirlpool created by the

“storm.” This geopolitical marginality offers her a relativised point of view. Being raised by a typical middle-class and Victorian-oriented mother, Lessing nevertheless acquires a kind of distance, a detachment from the empire-centred, class-bound England.

This detachment makes her say also that she is “outside of the tradition of the English novel” (Brewster 144). Lessing, in my view, observes from a distance not only the English novel but also the infrastructure of Western culture, particularly modernity. If Woolf professes in Three Guineas that she is an “outsider” standing on the “threshold”

as an allegedly inferior female, Lessing is also an “outsider” standing on the “threshold”

in a double sense – in the geopolitical sense, as well as in terms of gender.

The processes of nature that Lessing witnessed throughout the African bush provide her with a wider perspective – allowing her to see not merely English or even Western culture, but humanity as a whole. Irrational, ineffective, and incompetent as the processes of nature may sometimes be, they doubtless reflect – in Lessing’s view – exactly how things are. This idea is omnipresent in Lessing’s African short stories, of

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which I will introduce two here. In “The Sun between Their Feet” – which I will refer to again in Chapter 3 – a girl appears, irritated with the dung-beetle’s slow and awkward motion. She picks it up with its dung and puts it higher up – but the dung-beetle moves, holding its dung, back to the place where it has been, as if refusing her help and suggesting the inviolability of the processes of nature.

In “The Sunrise in the Veld,” an active and vigorous boy strides about the veld early in the morning, confident and satisfied with his physical and mental toughness and thinking that “there was nothing he couldn’t do, nothing!” (114). When he runs into a buck who cannot move because of his broken leg, however, he is at a loss; the buck is still alive yet being eaten by numerous ants swarming around it. He points his gun at the buck so as to stop its pain, but then he puts it down again, saying, “I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. There is nothing I can do” (118). The sheer contrast between his former utterance and his latter one is produced by his realisation that it is “how things work,” or,

“it [is] right . . . . It [is] right and nothing could alter it” (118: original italics).  

The ostensibly wasteful movement of the dung-beetle and the unlucky and absurd pain of the buck signify “how things work”; ways without apparent order, which cannot be judged through easy causality or rational logic but just have to be accepted. There are a large number of these workings throughout the bush, which for Lessing reveal the truth that things, including animals and human beings, are kept alive by something beyond their reach. Yet this sense of incompetence and passiveness is never at odds with her “humanism.” She declares:

. . . colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun . . . . Africa gives you the knowledge

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that man is the small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

(“This Was Old Chief’s Country” Preface, 8)

If we are “the small creatures, among other creatures,” we have to coexist together and equally; this is a core value of Lessing’s ambivalent humanism, oscillating between absurdity and hope in human life, between the stupidity and wisdom of human beings. It is noteworthy, however, that the process of nature at least can hardly find a comfortable niche within the capitalism, science, and technology which constitute the basis of the modern world. Again, if Woolf sees the modern world from the threshold of marginalised gender-experience, Lessing also sees it from the threshold – yet here doubly-marginalised, both in gender terms and as a woman within a cultural milieu which is incompatible with the seemingly established laws of modernity. Whether it is gender or actual experience that characterises the two writers, it seems an inevitable assignment for both Lessing and Woolf to examine from their detached positions how things should work within modernity.

Organisation

The thesis is compsed of five chapters, following the chronological careers of the two writers in turn. Chapter 1 covers Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), where Woolf elaborates her own narrative device, the “tunnelling process,” that persists in her texts thereafter. Here I explore the way in which Woolf, by way of this tunnelling process, digs into the consciousness of characters whose interconnection leads to a loose continuum evoking collective history. In Chapter 2, I focus on another of Woolf’s narrative devices embodied in Between the Acts (1941), which stands out because of its radical transformation of her narrative strategy, though the underlying intention remains

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unchanged. This device brings human reality to the visible surface world so as to demonstrate a miscellaneous human collectivity markedly opposed to the unity of fascism. Chapter 3 deals with Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1951), and one of her masterpieces, The Golden Notebook (1962); the latter is her first metafictional novel which embodies her struggle with postwar Britain. I explain how and why Lessing metamorphoses her narrative mode, keeping the same theme in spite of ostensibly radical changes. Chapter 4 moves on to examine Lessing’s short story “To Room Nineteen” (1962) and The Memoir of a Survivor (1974). “To Room Nineteen” is one of the most conspicuous among a large number of her short stories due to its potentially multiple interpretations despite the limited perspective, which, in my view, provides the way to see the collective current. In Memoir of a Survivor we can also penetrate the interactive movement between the personal and the collective, this time within an extensive topographical space. Therefore, it is by comparing these two fictions that we can see how Lessing makes it clear that the decisions regarding what we call reality – along with the historical perspective offered to us through the “small personal” life – are explored in entirely different ways. Chapter 5 investigates The Fifth Child (1988), one of the most controversial of Lessing’s fictions, where Lessing fragments one of the allegedly fixed social realities – national identity – by intertwining a realistic narrative with a gothic-like fantasy. Furthermore, in this novel – set mainly in England, in the 1980s – echoes of Victorian anxiety as well as 1930s fascist ideology offer a fitting example of the recursion of historical events that actually happened a few decades ago.

In spite of my main focus on “recursive history,” I will deal with these fictions of

Woolf and Lessing chronologically because my argument will thus become easier to

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follow; I have no intention to lose or confuse the reader. Though I want to insist that human reality should not be confined to one version nor be forced into a single chronological line, I do not refuse the surface of the material world and linear clock-time; Indeed, we could not live our daily lives without them. Lessing says that

“[o]ne must accumulate enough daily details in order that the reader isn’t lost . . . so that he can then respond to the irrational” (Conversations 67), a quotation I will return to in Chapter 4. Something similar if also true with regard to time; we not infrequently need the anchor of clock and calendar. Nevertheless, I will show how recursive history appears again and again in these chronologically aligned texts.

Notes

This series of her biographical novels includes Martha Quest (1952), Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1966), and The Four Gated City (1969).

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/presentation-speech.html

Wästberg also refers to “the great library of [Lessing’s] work” as the place “where all sections are unmarked and all genre classification pointless.” This suggestion is very close to the themes of my thesis.

Lessing refers to the intertwined connections between humans or individuals and the collective as

“a world-mind, a world ethic” in her preface to the second edition of The Golden Notebook (1971) (14), which Marxism is a first – unsuccessful – attempt at. She sometimes calls the world-mind Zeitgeist, for instance in Under My Skin. This world-mind is, in my view, an indispensable idea for both Woolf and Lessing.

Lessing had never lived in London up to this point. However, England was her parents’ homeland and, in fact, the family went back to London for a short stay immediately before moving to Africa.

These facts suggest the uncertain nature of Lessing’s origin.

Languages Lessing’s works have been translated into include French, Swedish, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.

It is questionable when “now” is, though, because she says Alfred and Emily published in 2008 is to be her last book. http://www.dorislessing.org/biography.html

For example, Peter Childs announces in Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) that since Lessing and Naipaul reached their summit before 1970, he does not include them in his list of selected twelve novelists (19).

Other reading also seems to follow around the same conception of a postwar literary scene;

though Andrej Gąsiorek points out the misconnection of realism and liberalism, he argues for a propensity toward realism in the 1950s, elucidating that “[t]o defend realism in the 1950s is to be aligned not only with ‘good old English tradition’ . . . but also with a broad commitment to liberal

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humanism” (4). I will come to this again in Chapter 3.

As I will mention in Chapter 3, Lessing declares in her oft-quoted essay, “The Small Personal Voice,” that a writer is “an architect of soul” and, therefore, he or she is responsible for society. Her jump into space fiction upset the critics at the time: in a 1977 MLA session, while Terrell Dixon suggests a kinship between Lessing and the “‘new realism’ of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute,” Mildred Sarah Greene and Virginia Tiger indicate Lessing’s attraction toward the

eighteenth century, pointing out the affinity of Anna Wulf with the Princess of Cleve, and of Lessing with Mary Wollstonecraft. (Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds, Doris Lessing: Alchemy of Survival, 26-7) After Shikasta was published, however, it “radically challenge[d] all tentative conclusions reached in the seventies about Lessing’s ‘place’ in one tradition or another” (28).

10 Still, it is noteworthy that, already in the early 80s, Betsy Draine gave attention to the need to see all of Lessing’s novels as forming a trajectory, saying that: “[t]he use of the word

‘evolutionary’ . . . ought to counsel against labeling any one of Lessing’s choice of genre or technique as her definitive or perfected form . . . it may be wise to follow Lessing’s lead in

recognizing that her moments of artistic triumph are very often moments of upheaval – moments in which the ‘perfected’ forms are broken by the intrusion of new and unexpected imperatives. It is the history of these formal cataclysms – and of the readerly joy which they make possible – that I attempt to trace in this study of Lessing’s works.” (Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing, xv)

11 There were arguments both for and against Woolf’s books: while she was admired for making a brave try at experimental form along with James Joyce or Marcel Proust, the very form of her books gave not a little dismay to some reviewers like Arnold Bennett. (Goldman 127)

12 Auerbach identifies the connection between Woolf’s work and the time, stating in Mimesis that

“[a]t the time of the first World War and after – in a Europe unsure of itself, overflowing with unsettled ideologies and ways of life, and pregnant with disaster – certain writers distinguished by instinct and insight find a method which dissolves reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness. That this method should have been developed at this time is not hard to understand”

(551).

13 Laura Marcus enunciates this tendency of criticism on Woolf, for example, the application of Kristevan reading of Woolf such as definition of the place of the pre-symbolic or “semiotic” based on “Freud’s distinction between pre-Oedipal and Oedipal sexual drives and Lacan’s concepts of the

‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic,’” in her essay, “Woolf’s feminism and feminism’s Woolf” in Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. (231)

14 Shlueter insists that when Mary Turner in The Grass Is Singing senses repulsively the native women’s stolid manner in their sexual and maternal qualities, it resembles “the revulsion felt by Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen” in Women in Love (19). Before Shlueter – in her 1965 monograph, Doris Lessing – Dorothy Brewster also refers to Woolf, but only because Lessing mentions Woolf in her 1962 interview in order to compare her experience in Africa with that of Woolf in London, a comparison which I will quote in Chapter 3. Brewster herself declares that Lessing’s psychological analysis has a keen affinity with George Eliot’s manner (159).

15 Fand’s argument is close to my point regarding the cyclical nature of both impersonal and personal experience, and yet she employs much more psychoanalysis and feminist theory than I do.

16 This intertwined relationship is marked most strikingly in Between the Acts and The Golden Notebook – even if in entirely different ways, as I will show in Chapters 2 and 3.

17 In the same paragraph Lessing mentions: “[f]rom her [Woolf’s] first novel, The Voyage Out, to the last, the unfinished Between the Acts – which has for me the stamp of truth: I remember whole passages, and incidents of a few words or lines seem to hold the essence of let’s say, old age, or marriage, or how you experience a much-loved picture – her writing life was a progression of daring experiments” (24).

18 In this respect Lessing admits in her memorial book for her parents, Alfred and Emily, that: “I think my father’s rage at the Trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me.

Do children feel their parents’ emotions? Yes, it is, and it is a legacy I could have done without.

What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness” (258).

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19 She always maintained that she became a communist not because she believed in Marxist dogma but because she wanted to be a humanist. For example, she recalls the time when she first entered the communist group in Southern Rhodesia: “In my case it was because for the first time in my life I was meeting a group of people . . . who read everything, and who did not think it

remarkable to read, and among whom thoughts about Native Problem I had scarcely dared to say aloud turned out to be mere commonplace . . .” (Under My Skin 259).

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