Alfred and Emily: A Moving Historical Memoir of Family Legacies and the Great War - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007240171 ISBN 13: 9780007240173

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2009

Synopsis

Doris Lessing’s first book after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature revisits her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents led.

‘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, 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, Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match 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 hulking over Lessing’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.’

About this title

About the Author

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007240171
• ISBN 13: 9780007240173
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288