More casually written and organized than Under My Skin, the second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography boasts the same acute, brutally frank insights. She begins with her 1949 arrival in London as a 30-year-old single mother from Rhodesia who is searching for a place and a means to write freely; Lessing closes in 1962 with the publication of her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook. In between, she covers love affairs, years of psychotherapy, and her increasingly disenchanted involvement with the Communist Party. Walking in the Shade is essential reading for anyone interested in mid-century British culture.


From Library Journal
A follow-up to Lessing's acclaimed memoir, Under My Skin (LJ 10/1/94), this volume covers the years when she wrote The Golden Notebook.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review
"Justifies by her extraordinary variety of her achievements, her exceptional memory and her facility as a writer."


Entertainment Weekly
Although she spins countless anecdotes on "politics and personalities" from her years in the Communist party, vivid personal details--on a wrenching love affair, on her mulling walks alone at night--come too rarely. This volume feels like an impressive house without quite enough windows.


The New York Times Book Review, Frank Kermode
Doris Lessing is evidently serious about her autobiography, which is already over 800 pages.... The statesmanlike length of the book is probably justified by the extraordinary variety of her achievements, her exceptional memory and her facility as a writer.


Los Angeles Times Book Review
"You can't help but admire her independence of thought and feeling and her willingness to ovberturn all the precepts upon which her very existence has been predicted."


Washington Post Book World
"The story couldn't be better told. She is there, marvelously urgent, translucently sincereDoris Lessing in person."


From Booklist
Chatty, opinionated, intimate, Lessing is as hard on herself as she is on some of her famous contemporaries. She looks back at the 1950s when "everyone" in London was a Communist sympathizer and she was one of the Angry Young Men. Like her first volume, Under My Skin (1994), this sequel combines social history and personal revelation. She begins with her arrival in war-battered London from Southern Rhodesia in 1949 with a small child to support and her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, to sell. She ends with the publication of her most celebrated work, The Golden Notebook, and many will read this memoir for what it says about her when she was writing what has been called "the bible of the Women's Movement." She writes about the "contradictory, lunatic" emotions and behaviors that made her join the Communist Party and then about her disillusionment with all those dreams of a golden age. At the same time, she is the archetypal new independent woman, trying to balance her roles as breadwinner, mother, daughter, lover, neighbor, friend, and comrade, while she struggles to retreat from it all, to find the isolation, the "underwater state," she needs in order to write. Not the least of the pleasures here is the gossip, the glimpses, some friendly, some acerbic, about the famous, from Bertrand Russell and Joshua Nkomo to Henry Kissinger ("He experienced me as a sanctimonious wincing idiot") and Vanessa Redgrave ("Oh my God, that was me not so long ago, and how did people put up with me"). Lessing can be silly and infuriating (as in the glib comparison of American and European men in bed), but all those readers who "want to think as they read" will find much here to make them recognize their own uncertainties. Hazel Rochman


From Kirkus Reviews
Lessing, as this second installment of her autobiography again proves, is one of those rare writers who has lived the examined life and is willing to share what she has learned and done, even if it is not to her credit. Unlike the first volume of memoirs (Under My Skin, 1994), the personal narrative takes second place here as Lessing concentrates on the intellectual and ideological forces that affected her during the 1950s. She arrived in London with her young son, Peter, in 1949, after leaving her second husband. London was still a bleak and bombed-out city--housing was short, food was rationed, and the people were enervated. Lessing found a good agent and managed to live on her earnings as a writer. She describes her mother's lonely death in Rhodesia, caused in part, Lessing thinks, by her rejection of her mother's offers of affection and support. She does not slight the personal or domestic: She worries about raising Peter as a single parent, and frankly describes her two lengthy affairs. But it is the world of ideas, of publishing, writing, and the theater, that primarily engage her. She describes how she writes and what she tried to achieve in writing her immensely influential novel The Golden Notebook. She is frank about joining the Communist Party (probably ``the most neurotic act of my life''); about her disillusionment with it and other mass movements (``the first impulse was the thrills . . . secondly came the politics''); and she is angry and insightful about the British, who suffer, she says, from ``a reluctance to understand extreme experience.'' A history of a difficult, often grim time related by an astute observer, as well as a truthful record of a bumpy journey to self- knowledge. Further proof, if it were needed, of Lessing's remarkable ability to look reality in the face and not blink. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



"Justifies by her extraordinary variety of her achievements, her exceptional memory and her facility as a writer."



"The life she describes is heroric...yet astonishingly full, with political work, writing, friendships, lovers and travel."


Book Description
The second volume of Doris Lessing's extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949-62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities. Walking in the Shade is an invaluable social history as well as Doris Lessing's Sentimental Education.


About the Author
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: Her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Her mother installed Doris in a covenant school, and then later in an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was 13, and it was the end of her formal education.Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the cultural and biological imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good.Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the 19th century -- their "climate of ethical judgment" -- to the demands of 20th-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1952-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wolf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wolf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science-fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbor, 1983, and If the Old Could., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 was recently joined by Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962, both published by HarperCollins.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Walking in the Shade covers the years 1949 -1962, from Lessing's arrival in London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. This was the period of the Cold War, a poisonously political time, but Doris Lessing reminds us -- in perhaps the book's most striking achievement -- of what has been forgotten: that it was a time also of idealism and hope, of a sense of personal responsibility for the world, and of generosity of the imagination. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the '50s -- it is hard now to appreciate how much -- and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Walking in the Shade also evokes the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother in 1950s London: her early success as one of the new hopeful post-war writers whose novels and short stories received critical acclaim both in Britain and abroad; her work in the theater where she befriended Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Arnold Wesker; her political activities through which she met such opinion-makers of the time as E.P. Thompson, Bertrand Russell, and Henry Kissinger; and her romantic liaisons with men on the Left. Walking in the Shade ends in the winter of 1962-63. By this time, London -- indeed Britain and all of Europe -- had been rebuilt from ruins and poverty to newness and plenty. To the author it seemed that her life correspondingly climbed up from difficulty and dark.

FROM THE CRITICS

San Francisco Chronicle

The life she describes is heroric...yet astonishingly full, with political work, writing, friendships, lovers and travel.

New York Times Book Review

Justifies by her extraordinary variety of her achievements, her exceptional memory and her facility as a writer.

Washington Post Book World

The story couldn't be better told. She is there, marvelously urgent, translucently sincere—Doris Lessing in person.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

You can't help but admire her independence of thought and feeling and her willingness to ovberturn all the precepts upon which her very existence has been predicted.

Wall Street Journal