Alfred and Emily

Booklist

"Laced with the subtlest of observations and the wryest of wit...This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir (and family photographs) results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic."

Michiko Kakutani

"An intriguing work . . . [that] shimmers with precisely remembered details."

Washington Post Book World

"A clever, moving coupling of fiction and nonfiction. ALFRED & EMILY is...a testament to [Lessing’s] ongoing literary vitality."

Christian Science Monitor

"A truly intriguing piece of work...the book is also an interesting glimpse of an empire and an era."

Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A stirring exploration . . . gently yet deeply moving"

USA Today

"Alfred and Emily reveals why Lessing deserved literature’s highest honor. There is a remarkable level of courage, honesty, and wisdom in Alfred and Emily. . . . Lessing, nearing 90, continues to surprise."

Booklist (starred review)

“Laced with the subtlest of observations and the wryest of wit...This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir (and family photographs) results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic.”

Wall Street Journal

"She has never displayed her potent imagination to better effect, or her gift for probing realism . . . a profoundly moving memoir and portrait of a marriage."

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"An odd and powerful excursion into lost time. . . . a powerful reminder not only of Lessing’s past but also of how each of us can return to our own and come back with something precious."

Michiko Kakutani

Writing with the incandescent clarity of her 88 years, Ms. Lessing—the 2007 Nobel laureate—conveys the appreciation she now feels for the hardship of her parents' lives, and the anger she often felt as a young girl in rebellion against her mother…[the] fictional portion of the book lacks all the beautiful specificity of the memoir part of the volume, which shimmers with precisely remembered details about the African countryside, Ms. Lessing's parents' house in the bush and her own difficulties negotiating the rocky ground of her girlhood.
—The New York Times

Caryn James

The entire project of Alfred and Emily is more revealing than either part of the book alone. The novella can be flat-footed; the biographical material is more thorough in Under My Skin. But it's amazing to witness Lessing, at 88, still ferociously grappling with the meaning of her parents' shattered lives. Of course, in explaining them she is also explaining herself…In its generosity of spirit, its shaped and contained fury, Alfred and Emily is also an extraordinary, unconventional addition to Lessing's autobiography. She's said she has written her last book (well, she has said a lot of silly things), but there isn't the slightest tone of valediction or summing up here. That's why she remains so vital: even in old age, she sounds as fierce and passionate as a girl.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

The 2007 Nobel Prize in literature was a "bloody disaster" for Lessing, she recently told the BBC. This curious work-half fiction, half memoir, hampered by slapdash prose and an unfocused organization-may be the result of that unsettling time, when she said she didn't have the energy to write a full novel. The opening novella (the longer of the two pieces) is what might have become of her parents, Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh, if they had never married. The sluggish account of their parallel lives is notable mainly for Lessing's commentary on the changing economic, social and cultural mores in England before and after WWI. The second section is a rambling series of recollections that describe the family's failed farm in Southern Rhodesia. Lessing describes her mother's dominating personality, attributing her mother's smothering attention to her frustration at having given up a successful wartime nursing career and a vital social life to raise a family. Lessing's longtime readers will find little new in her autobiographical disclosures, and new readers will look in vain for the talent that won the Nobel. 11 b&w photos. (Aug.)

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Library Journal

Lessing here showcases the uncanny abilities that earned her the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Author of over 50 works (including novels The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook), Lessing again visits the autobiographical theme of her upbringing. The first half of her latest book is a fictional novella detailing what Lessing imagines the lives of her parents would have been like without the interruption of Word War I. Relying on traits of character, wistful thoughts, and personality clues, Lessing casts her father, Alfred Tayler, as a kindhearted farmer. Her mother, Emily McVeagh, takes shape as a nurse turned socialite turned charitable school administrator. The book's second half is the true story of Lessing's childhood in Persia and Rhodesia. Describing the impact of her father's war injury and her mother's physical and mental losses, Lessing investigates the differences between what might have been and what truly happened. Her book is recommended for public and academic library collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ4/15/08.]
—Erin E. Dorney

Kirkus Reviews

In her first post-Nobel book, Lessing (The Cleft, 2007, etc.) imagines what her parents' life-and England-would have been like if World War I had never happened. That's the premise of the shrewd novella that comprises the most interesting half of this slightly scattershot assemblage. In real life, Emily McVeagh and Alfred Tayler met as nurse and gravely wounded soldier in a London hospital, married and settled in Rhodesia, where Lessing and her brother were raised while the Taylers tried to carve a good living from a colonial outpost that wasn't at all what they expected. (A bracing nonfiction section following the novella delves into that.) In "Alfred and Emily," they come from the same small English town, but he stays there to become a prosperous farmer while she defies her father's wishes to train as a nurse in London. She marries a prominent doctor (unhappily); he marries a warm, comforting woman beloved by his drunken best mate nearly as much as by Alfred. Without the traumatizing World War, England remains affluent and comfortable, but also class-divided and stagnant; Lessing's taste for discomfiting truths is as evident as ever. The diverse pieces that follow have their ups and downs. The material about her parents will be familiar in its broad strokes to anyone who read Lessing's autobiography (Under My Skin, 1994, and Walking in the Shade, 1997), but it forms a pointed and instructive counterbalance to the novella. A few shorter, more casual pieces ("Insects," "Provisions," Servant Problems," etc.) don't add much to what Lessing has written before about Africa, but "My Brother Harry Tayler" gives the author a chance to expatiate on her sibling, her own children and the end ofwhite rule in Rhodesia with an acuity all the more impressive since it requires barely eight pages. At age 89, the author may be slowing down a trifle, but the best parts here are as bracing and engaging as anything she's written in the past 30 years.

The Barnes & Noble Review

"In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born, and what happened before that is myth," pronounced V. S. Pritchett in A Cab at the Door, the entertaining 1968 memoir about his English childhood.

In the fictionalized first half of Alfred and Emily -- a hybrid that sutures together a novella and a memoir -- Doris Lessing concerns herself not with what actually preceded her birth but with what might have. She extends Pritchett's notion by erasing herself from the picture and conjuring mythical versions of her parents, reimagining their lives without World War One. The result is they would never have married and, by Lessing's admission, would have thus been much happier.

In a 1988 interview with The Paris Review, Lessing was asked to explain a short autobiographical piece she'd written for the literary magazine Granta. The interviewer observed that while the title implied that it was "about your mother. In some ways it really seemed to be more about your father."

Lessing replied: "Well, how can one write about them separately? Her life was, as they used to say, devoted to his life."

Alfred and Emily takes the rhetorical question in this response and uses it as a springboard, separating her married parents from each other -- the obverse of the fantasy of many children of divorce. What she then seeks to do in the book's second part -- her true account of what happened -- is to separate them from herself.

Writing the first section as a novella allows Lessing the freedom to perform a kind of benediction; she gives her parents the lives they said they really wanted. It's an unusual conceit and, both for the imagined Alfred and Emily as well as the reader, it turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Without the war to bring her parents together, Lessing imagines that their influence on each other was peripheral. She stages their eventual meeting at a cricket match in their late teens, as Emily McVeagh is preparing to become a nurse and Alfred Tayler, a farmer. Having been disowned by her father, who views her career choice as inferior, Emily marries an emotionally detached cardiologist, a character based upon the man Lessing's mother loved -- and lost -- in the war. The couple has no children, or romance, and Emily's life only finds happiness and purpose following his death, when she uses her inheritance to fund new schools. She dies at 73, as in real life, though the fictionalized death is far more brutal than heart failure; she intercedes to stop some boys from picking on a dog, and the boys turn on her.

Alfred, meanwhile, accomplishes "his heart's desire" by running an English farm and marrying a soft, affectionate woman named Betsy, with whom he has twin boys. Instead of dying of diabetes at 62, he lives to a ripe old age. Describing the earlier writing she has done about her father, Lessing says: "He comes out clearly, unambiguous, all himself," and the same can be said for his fictive double.

In the Paris Review interview, Lessing confessed: "[H]e was a remarkable bloke, my father. He was a totally impractical man. Partly because of the war, all that. He just drifted off, he couldn't cope. My mother was the organizer, and kept everything together."

The generosity Lessing has bestowed upon her parents in this novella -- in giving them their ostensible dream lives -- is of course for her own benefit. Despite all of the tragic and unfulfilled aspects of her mother's experience, she writes, "The real Emily McVeagh was an educator....This is how I want to remember her."

Leaving behind this thought-provoking but somewhat weightless fictive frame, the stronger, more immediate latter half of the book picks up after the Great War, "the war to end all war," when Lessing's parents moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father hoped that growing maize would yield enough money to afford a farm in the English countryside. What lay in store, however, was a terrible misadventure, with a farm "too small to achieve anything in the way of serious profit." Isolated, each of her parents struggled with depression and other aftereffects of the war.

A wartime nurse, her mother met her future husband in the hospital after he'd lost his right leg. Throughout Lessing's childhood, her father obsessed about his experiences in the trenches. "It took me years," writes Lessing, "and years -- and years -- to see it: my mother had no visible scars, no wounds, but she was as much a victim of the war as my poor father." Though she survived physically unscathed, her own ordeals there were as traumatic as his.

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize, Lessing also received, like Pritchett, a Golden PEN Award for her prolific contribution to contemporary literature. Best known for her feminist novel The Golden Notebook (1962) and for her science fiction, she has also written about her family, with various levels of bitterness. Martha Quest (1952), her autobiographical second novel, burns with outrage toward the character of the heroine's mother, in a thinly veiled depiction of Lessing's own mother-and-daughter battle. "It was cruel, that book," she admits in Alfred and Emily. "Would I do it now? But what I was doing was part of the trying to get free."

All these decades later, she is still struggling to break away. One of the primary differences between this work and her previous memoirs is that here, even though she still espouses abhorrence for her mother, she circles back to their shared history with the benefits of hindsight. Lessing is nearing 90; this book, which she claims will be her last, shares with her other great books a lofty concept and forcefully direct language. What sets this work apart from Lessing's prior books is her accessibility. When reading of her relationship with her parents, especially her mother, it's difficult not to cringe in recognition of one's own fight for autonomy. Lessing hated her mother, but instead of devoting her considerable energies merely to describing her outrage and disgust, she acknowledges: "I owe to her, my mother, my introduction to books, reading -- all that has been my life."

In one of the most heartbreaking scenes, Lessing writes of the beautiful dresses her mother brought along to Rhodesia, planning for regular garden parties and dances. Completely unsuitable for the harsh realities of Africa, the gowns were eaten by moths and eventually handed over to Lessing. "You can use them for dressing up. Or cut them up," her mother said, before running out of the room to cry.

Insofar as those dresses represent her mother's desires, Lessing did cut them up. Between the honest cruelty of Martha Quest and the equally authentic compassion of Alfred and Emily, Lessing has succeeded not in breaking free from her parents but in recognizing the impossibility of such a mission. She does succeed, as much as any of us may hope to do, in making sense of their legacy, treading through their thwarted dreams and mistakes to arrive, finally, at the end of her own life. From a tragic and terrible childhood, and her mother's meddlesome and oppressive stake in her identity, Lessing has sewn together an astonishing reminiscence. --Sarah Norris

Sarah Norris, arts editor of The Villager, has reviewed books for The New Yorker, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and other publications.