Doris Lessing is many different things to her readers, most of whom, sooner or later, feel forsaken or betrayed by her. Though dogged by -936- accusations of being too dogmatic and polemical, Lessing has never pleased any political party, theory, or faction for very long. Though acclaimed for her realism, the mirror Lessing holds up to human nature and human achievement is brutally frank and never flattering. But neither political unorthodoxy nor candor quite accounts for the response she gets each time her fiction takes a new turn. Her readers and reviewers are rarely astonished and delighted at the startling new prospects she offers; rather they sound a note of resentment or indignation, as though she has let them down or done them a personal injury. Their response is less, I think, to the content of Lessing's vision than it is to the kind of relation she establishes with her readers. She is their Klorathy, their Canopus, their mentor and guide to moral probity and the prefigurative powers of the imagination. While she does full justice to her readers' intelligence, never pretending that the future they face is anything less than terrifying, she also convinces them that their efforts at rescue and reform are necessary and useful. Her readers feel for her an attachment and devotion that Lessing both appreciates and deplores. The problem with her readers, Lessing complained after the publication of the first volume of Canopus in Argos is that they want her to keep doing the same thing, to keep being the writer they know and love. To her earliest fans, she was a left-wing writer about Africa, a stalwart critic of capitalism and the color bar, and a brilliant conduit to the exotic. To these readers, The Golden Notebook was an enigma or a disappointment, and The Four-Gated City, the kiss of death. But these novels brought her new and equally passionate readers. Ex-communists recognized in them their own struggles and disillusionments. The fledgling antinuclear and environmental movements discerned in them the work of a powerful ally. Political and social historians found in them an extraordinarily acute and sophisticated rendering of the cultural climate of Europe during the early years of the Cold War. Postmodernist literary critics celebrated the deconstruction of modernist aesthetics and the disintegration of the narrative of commitment. Members of the reviving feminist movement greeted them, along with The Summer Before the Dark, as bibles of women's liberation. All these readers were uneasy, however, about the futurist ending of The Four-Gated City and about its legitimization of madness and extrasensory perception, an uneasiness that turned to dismay with the publication of Briefing for a Descent into Hell and Memoirs of a Survivor. Though these novels discouraged her political and academic following, they were warmly welcomed by the -937- psychoanalytic community. Laingians saw in them a validation of their contention that the only sane members of a mad society are those whom that society calls insane, Jungians discovered in them a gold mine of archetypes, and devotees of psychic phenomena took them as an affirmation of the untapped resources of the human mind. These novels also began to attract the mystics and sci-fi fans and devotees of the scathing political satires of Jonathan Swift, who would crow over Canopus in Argos and lead some of the more conventional newspapers and journals to headline their reviews of the series 'The Spacing Out of Doris Lessing' or 'Lessing Slips Her Moorings in Space.' Though the readers who celebrated Lessing as the great political realist of our time were thoroughly disenchanted by her forays into Sufism, Swiftianism, and outer space, they have recently been won back by the more familiar landscapes of The Diaries of Jane Somers, The Fifth Child, and The Good Terrorist. Lessing's unpredictability has undoubtedly cost her the loyalty of some of her readers and has probably cost her the Nobel Prize, but it is also precisely what makes her such a canny illuminator of these 'dreadful and marvellous times where the certainties of yesterday dissolve as we live.'
Lynne Hanley
Selected Bibliography Draine Betsy. Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Modern Fiction Studies 26 (Spring 1980). Special issue on Doris Lessing.
Pratt Annis, and L. S. Dembo, eds. Doris Lessing: Critical Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974.
Rubenstein Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Sprague Claire. Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Sprague Claire, ed. In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Taylor Jenny, ed. Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.
The Doris Lessing Newsletter.
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Drabble to Carter: Fiction by Women, 1962–1992
Visit to Jane Austen's house… I put my hand down on Jane's desk and bring it up covered with dust.
Barbara Pym, journal entry, August 11, 1967 Oh indeed! We knew we only sold the simulacra.
'Fevvers,' winged heroine of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus THE contemporary novelists discussed in this chapter-Margaret Drabble, Barbara Pym (three later works), Anita Brookner, A. S. Byatt, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, and Angela Carter-are by no means a homogenous group. Thirty years of personal history as well as widely varying reactions to intercurrent discourses such as feminism and postmodernism (which are discussed below) have made major differences among them-in some cases, differences between their own earlier and later work. Yet most of this chapter will focus on traits in common. A collective, synoptic approach is appropriate if only as a corrective to the atmosphere of competition in which each has always worked-ranked and set against each other as competitors for popular success, for publishers' limited marketing resources, and for the literary prizes that in Britain confer, if not canonization, at least a conditional (though frequently controversial) beatification on contemporary novels. Three of these writers have received Britain's most publicized literary award, the Booker Prize: Antonia Susan Byatt for Possession in 1990, Penelope Lively for Moon Tiger in 1987, and Anita Brookner for Hotel du Lac in 1984. (In 1984 Lively was also named on the shortlist of six finalists for her According to Mark.) Fay Weldon has been short-listed for the prize (for Praxis, in 1979), and in 1983 she was the first (and is still the only) woman chosen to chair the panel of judges. Angela Carter served with Weldon on the judges' panel in 1983, but none of Carter's novels was ever short-listed for the Booker Prize. No novel by Margaret Drabble has appeared on -939- the Booker shortlist, nor did the three novels published by Barbara Pym after the establishment of the Booker Prize in 1969 receive this recognition; although in 1977 the chair of the judges' panel, Philip Larkin (a great admirer of Pym's fiction), managed to introduce Quartet in Autumn among the dozen works that received serious discussion.
End of a Dying Tradition? These data about the Booker Prize are not provided to classify the novelists by prestige and rank, but to illustrate a paradox: if the Booker shortlist is used as the barometer of status, the three writers most celebrated in the United States (Drabble, Pym, and Carter) have received least recognition in Britain. The probable reason for this, and a trait central to all these novelists (whether recognized or snubbed by the Booker committees) is the strongly «English» flavor of their best novels-their shared willingness to focus on continuing, revising, or enlarging (rather than breaking with) specifically English literary traditions. Even the least insular of these seven writers, Angela Carter, who died in February 1992, situated her last and best novels — Wise Children (1991) and Nights at the Circus (1984) — largely in London, and in
