Alfred and Emily - Hardcover

Lessing, Doris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007233450 ISBN 13: 9780007233458

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2008

Synopsis

The first book after Doris’ Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead.

'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.'

In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land.

'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that.

About this title

About the Author

Doris Lessing was the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first novel, ‘The Grass is Singing’ was published in 1950, and since then her international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated novels are ‘The Golden Notebook’, ‘The Summer Before the Dark’, and ‘Memoirs of a Survivor’. Her most recent works include two volumes of autobiography, ‘Under my Skin’ and ‘Walking in the Shade’, her most recent novel is ‘The Cleft’.

From the Inside Flap

I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.

In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital.

In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier life her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war, a story that begins with them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationaship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, the family's move to Africa and the impact of her parent's marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land.

'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' Triumphantly, with the publication of Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007233450
• ISBN 13: 9780007233458
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 274