. Primary reading
Doris Lessing, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980)
. Secondary reading (to be provided on handouts)
- Christopher Bigsby, ‘The Need to Tell Stories’. - B.F. Nellist, ‘Surviving Change’. - Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, ‘Sufism, Jung and the Myth of Kore: Revisionist Politics in Lessing’s Marriages’.
. Secondary reading (library)
- Harold Bloom (editor), Doris Lessing: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views (Philadeliphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003) [PR6062.E8 DOR] - Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis (editor), Spiritual exploration in the works of Doris Lessing (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999) [PR6062.E8 SPI]. - Roberta Rubenstein, The novelistic vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the forms of consciousness (London : University of Illinois Press, 1979) [PR6062.E8 RUB].
. Other works by Lessing
The other novels in the ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series are: Shikasta (1979), The Sirian Experiments (1980), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982) and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983). For a contrasting exploration of marriage, see Lessing in realist mode in A Proper Marriage (1954). Her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), is a prelude to the spiritual and/or psychological questions she confronts in the 'Canopus in Argos' sequence; it is also an example of the novel as documentary realism. The ‘Preface’ later added to the book is a provocative commentary on reactions to it (including feminist responses). A recent novel, The Cleft (2007), is a playful exploration of an idea that women preceded men, creating a new myth of origin. Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), based on a series of lectures, articulates Lessing's belief that we are ‘dominated by our savage past, as individuals and groups’, an idea that informs much of her fiction.
. Biography
There is, as yet, no major biography of Lessing (she has fiercely resisted several attempts). The most useful source therefore remains the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). The second volume, Walking in the Shade (1997) is thinner and deliberately elides much of the spiritual awakening that Lessing herself experienced. On Cats (2002; a combination of two earlier books) is also revealing.
Tom Sperlinger [email protected]