Communism, General & Miscellaneous Biography, Women's Biography, Political Biography, Women's Biography, Literary Figures - Women's Biography, British & Irish Literary Biography, British History - General & Miscellaneous

Walking in the Shade: My Autobiography, 1949-1962, Vol. 2

Name: Walking in the Shade: My Autobiography, 1949-1962, Vol. 2
Author: Doris Lessing
ISBN: 9780060929565

by Doris Lessing

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Overview

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.

Synopsis

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.

Wall Street Journal

Compelling reading. . . .Lively and provocative.

About the Author, Doris Lessing

"Doris Lessing is the kind of writer who has followers, not just readers," Lesley Hazleton once observed. But Lessing, whose novel The Golden Notebook was embraced as a feminist icon, has seldom told her followers exactly what they wanted to hear.

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Editorials

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.

New York Times Book Review

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

San Francisco Chronicle

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

Wall Street Journal

Compelling reading. . . .Lively and provocative.

Washington Post Book World

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

Booknews

This second volume of novelist, poet and playwright Lessing's autobiography describes her life in post-war England from age 30 to age 42. The author of The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook discusses the early critical successes of her novels and poems; her work in the theater with people such as Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Arnold Wesker; her political activities as a communist and her eventual disillusionment with communism; and her romantic liaisons with various leftists.

Entertainment Weekly

Rich anecdotes and personal details spice up British novelist's briskly meticulous memoir.

Wall Street Journal

Compelling reading. . . .Lively and provocative.

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, 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 ,i>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.