IN IDoris Lessing and Romanticism, a long, dense, and carefully reasoned article, Michael Magie shares his disturbance over the effect that Lessing is likely have on her readers.1 Praising her realism and her clear-sighted analytical portraits (540), he criticizes her excessive scepticism about and rationality and her excessive generosity toward madness and mysticism. He feels that her work is likely have a bad influence on readers its urgings despair are based upon a faulty epistemology and a faulty ontology. And he concludes (in a statement about The Golden Notebook which I think he would apply most of her work since that novel was published in 1962) that, in Lessing, reason panders will, in that understanding conducts sympathetic approval rather than critical assessment (540). He fears that Lessing fosters moral obtuseness (547) and self-indulgence (552), that her intelligence is invested in an invitation stupidity (540). Magie is aware that many of the positions of which he disapproves are positions about which Lessing herself is skeptical. The Four-Gated City is such a long novel, he says, partly because of its author's resistance the ideas she was herself exploring there. . . . To say however that Doris Lessing thinks certain thoughts reluctantly is yet confess that she thinks (536), and from his point of view, that she thinks them is cause for us be wary. I suggest, however, that what is involved in thinking thoughts reluctantly is what many of Lessing's stories and novels are about. Undoubtedly, there is in her work a sense of urgency, a sense I find in perfect accord with the present facts and future probabilities, a sense that we live in dangerous times and may no longer have the time for leisurely movements toward truth, the switchbacks and the careful assessments. There is also (and for me this quality creates much of the tension and resonance in Lessing's work) a compassionate awareness of humankind's elaborate, protective devices, our ability to know something and then forget it2 again and again. In short, I cannot agree with Magie's assumptions about the reader implied or created by Lessing's works. When I ask myself what happens me when I read her, what happens of the particular engagements, the particular exercises of mind, which the books encourage or demand, I answer that, most of the time, I find myself alert, mentally active, and far from despair. I find her developing readers who can attend what they might otherwise disregard. I find her stimulating men-