Abstract
Doris Lessing is not unusual in having begun her career with short stories. She is unusual in having continued to write short stories for a long time after she established her reputation as a novelist. In fact, it comes as a surprise to realise that she has stopped writing short stories (at least for now?). Her last volume of new short stories appeared in 1972. (Later volumes have collected previously published short stories.) Nonetheless, her short story writing paralleled her novel writing, perhaps her very best novel writing, for a very long time. Sometimes they preceded and deeply affected her novel writing.
My thanks to Ann Lane and Ron Lopez for help in arriving at a title.
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Notes
Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era (Cambridge, 1913) p. 745.
Quoted by Gordon Haight, Introduction to Middlemarch, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1956) xv.
Elizabeth Abel, ’The Golden Notebook: “Female Writing” and “The Great Tradition,”’ in Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger (eds), Critical Essays on Doris Lessing (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986) pp. 101–107.
For further discussion of Lessing’s recurrent A/M/J naming patterns, see Claire Sprague, Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Strategies of Doubling and Repetition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
Hanson, Clare, ‘Free Stories: The Shorter Fiction of Doris Lessing’, Doris Lessing Newsletter 9, 1 (1985) p. 7.
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© 1989 Clare Hanson
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Sprague, C. (1989). Genre Reversals in Doris Lessing: Stories Like Novels and Novels Like Stories. In: Hanson, C. (eds) Re-reading the Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10313-3_10
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