Breakdown and Regeneration: Some Major Themes in Doris Lessing's Latest Fiction

Abstract

Doris Lessing is still seen by many people as an advocate of women's liberation, but the truth is that sexual equality is merely one of her fundamental assumptions—"that filter which is a woman's way of looking at life has the same validity as the filter which is a man's way . . ." She wrote this in 1972 in a preface which she added to The Golden Notebook, protesting against ten years misreading of it as a trumpet for the women's movement.