Disorderly Company: From "The Golden Notebook" to "The Four-Gated City"

Abstract

1 Robert Musil, Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960-61), 3 vols., I, 130. 2 does not refer to careful organization of small structural units, for instance, the sentence; many of her admirers admit Lessing's verbosity, her tendency to overwrite. refers here to the larger structures, for instance, the arrangement of the material by means of the four notebooks and the frame Free Women, 1-5. See Florence Howe, Narrative, History and Prophecy, Nation, 209 (Aug. 11, 1969), 116; with slight reservations: Irving Howe, Neither Compromise nor Happiness, New Republic, 148 (Dec. 15, 1962), 19; Frederick R. Karl, Lessing in the Sixties: New Anatomy of Melancholy, Contemporary 13, No. 1 (Winter 1972), 15. See further Dorothy Brewster, Doris Lessing (New York: Twayne, 1965), pp. 139ff.; Selma R. Burkom, 'Only Connect': Form and Content in the Works of Doris Lessing, Critique, 11 (1968-69), 54ff.; Joseph E. Brewer, The Anti-Hero in Contemporary Literature, Iowa English Yearbook, 12 (1967), 58. 3 Jonah Raskin, Lessing at Stony Brook: An Interview, New American Review, 8 (1970), 170.