Submitted by norman birnbaum, Oct 13, 2007 12:30

Ms. Solomon's excellent note on Doris Lessing is a model of serious writing itself. What was striking about Ms. Lessing's early writings in England is how she recurred to a serious strain in English literature that went back to the eighteenth century---combining a considerable amount of psychological inquiry with the depiction of the world the literary characters had to live in, for better or for worse. I'd say that the argumentative intellectuals in Ms. Lessing's novels were offspring of those talking in the works of E.M. Forster and Aldous Huxley. Perhaps there are traces of those adopted ancestors of all of us, the denizens of the tower in Joyce's Ulysees. I had the good fortune to be living in the UK in the fifties and early sixties, and Ms. Lessing's writings rang true for many of her immediate contemporaries By the way, her 1992 piece on dogma and constraint must be an embarrassment to those who have been so quick to portray the prize as an exercise in "political correctness."

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