‘The Battle of the Books’: Lessing and the Critics

Abstract

While never succumbing to Charlotte Bronte’s direct overture to her ‘Dear Reader’, Doris Lessing has been canny in ways of trying to shape the reader’s response to her fiction. I have drawn the epigraph for this chapter from ‘The Small Personal Voice’, first published in 1957. In that essay, Lessing’s call for ‘serious criticism’ springs as much from her annoyance at reviews of Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage as it does from her overview of the contemporary British novel (deficient) in relation to nineteenth-century fiction (great, particularly if written by the French or the Russians). Lessing’s call chides what she saw as the effeteness of contemporary British criticism:

As long as critics are as ‘sensitive’, subjective, and uncommitted to anything but their own private sensibilities, there will be no body of criticism worth taking seriously in this country. At the moment our critics remind me of a lot of Victorian ladies making out their library lists: this is a ‘nice’ book; or it is not a ‘nice’ book; the characters are ‘nice’; or they are not ‘nice’.

(SPV, p. 14)

What we need more than anything else, I am convinced, is some serious criticism. The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

Lessing (SPV, p. 14)