Conclusion

Abstract

Doris Lessing’s contribution to the development of the novel is twofold: both her techniques and her subject-matter have broken boundaries and, as has been suggested, these are closely inter-related. The novel form has never been monolithic: in Tristram Shandy, for example, Laurence Sterne set up an alternative to realism before the realistic mode became established. Nevertheless, we tend in thinking of ‘the novel’ to take the nineteenth-century classic realist text as our model. And, in each generation, there are those writers who set out to subvert the realist tradition, to show how it is inadequate for their own particular time, to find out other ways of conveying their perceptions of what constitutes reality. Doris Lessing is such a writer for our times. She has taken risks, changed and moved on in her life, and this change and growth is reflected in her novels. Sometimes they follow a trend which she herself has signposted to the reader, and at other times they are utterly surprising, taking us into regions that are unexplored and uncharted. At the beginning of her canon she writes about the external world, but her protagonists are endowed with a sense of quest rather than acceptance or stasis.