The Diaries of Jane Somers
The Diaries of Jane Somers

Author: Doris Lessing

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 9780394729558

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These two novels show Lessing returning to an earlier narrative style with fresh power.

Anonymity
Anonymity

Author: John Mullan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0691230927

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Some of the greatest works in English literature were first published without their authors' names. Why did so many authors want to be anonymous--and what was it like to read their books without knowing for certain who had written them? In Anonymity, John Mullan gives a fascinating and original history of hidden identity in English literature. From the sixteenth century to today, he explores how the disguises of writers were first used and eventually penetrated, how anonymity teased readers and bamboozled critics--and how, when book reviews were also anonymous, reviewers played tricks of their own in return. Today we have forgotten that the first readers of Gulliver's Travels and Sense and Sensibility had to guess who their authors might be, and that writers like Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë went to elaborate lengths to keep secret their authorship of the best-selling books of their times. But, in fact, anonymity is everywhere in English literature. Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Defoe, Swift, Fanny Burney, Austen, Byron, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, George Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing--all hid their names. With great lucidity and wit, Anonymity tells the stories of these and many other writers, providing a fast-paced, entertaining, and informative tour through the history of English literature.

The Diaries of Jane Somers
The Diaries of Jane Somers

Author: Doris Lessing

Publisher: HarperPerennial

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13:

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First published by Michael Joseph in 1984, under a pseudonym, as The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could... , The Diaries of Jane Somers have been out of print for some time. In many ways they are classic Lessing: as resonant with social and political themes as The Golden Notebook and with them, Lessing returns to the realism of her early fiction with the wisdom and experience of maturity. The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort . But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other - Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman. If The Old Could... contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate as she struggles with an emotional breakdown and Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.

Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing
Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing

Author: Phyllis Perrakis

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1999-04-30

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13:

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Though Doris Lessing never explicitly refers to spirituality in her works, she nonetheless explores spiritual issues throughout her texts. This book examines the prominence of spirituality in her writings. The volume provides both close readings of individual works and sweeping surveys of her nearly fifty year career. The contributors employ a variety of theoretical perspectives such as systems theory, feminist studies of the body and of androgyny, postcolonial theories, mythic prophecy, and intersubjective psychology. The contributors reveal that Lessing's presentation of spirituality is neither rigid nor orthodox neither the product of the split between the body and the soul nor anchored in formal systems of the past or present. The volume is divided into three sections. The first, on spirituality manifested in everyday life, examines individual works in which ordinary experiences such as growing old or struggling to adopt to the difficulties of married life comment on spiritual concerns. Included are chapters on The Diaries of Jane Somers and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. The second section contains chapters on the formation and dissolution of individual identity for characters at different stages of the life cycle and the parallel changes within societies at different stages of cultural collapse. The third part presents chapters on the larger patterns that inform many of Lessing's works, with attention either to individual texts or to clusters of her writings.

States of Ireland
States of Ireland

Author: Conor Cruise O'Brien

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2015-02-19

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0571324304

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Written in 1972 in the wake of Bloody Sunday and direct rule, States of Ireland was Conor Cruise O'Brien's searching analysis of contemporary Irish nationalism: part-memoir, part-history, part-polemic. 'If The Great Melody (1992) is O'Brien's major academic work, States of Ireland is the one that will endure as a vital moment in Irish intellectual and political history.' Roy Foster, Standpoint ' States of Ireland [is] a book which influenced a generation. [O'Brien] saw that partition, while scarcely desirable in itself, recognized the reality of two different communities in the island, and that the Dublin state's formal irredentist claim on Northern Ireland was undemocratic and even imperialistic, as well as insincere. The republican ideology to which most Irish people paid lip service was a shirt of Nessus, he later wrote: "it clings to us and burns".' Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography