Alfred and Emily (Hardcover)

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• This item: Alfred and Emily by Doris May Lessing

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• The Golden Notebook (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by Doris May Lessing

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• The Grass Is Singing by Doris May Lessing

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The Golden Notebook (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by Doris May Lessing 3.7 out of 5 stars (10)  £4.85

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The Grass Is Singing by Doris May Lessing 4.1 out of 5 stars (14)  £5.99

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Review
'Writers approaching 90 aren't supposed to write with vigour or experiment with form. But Lessing has never done the expected thing and "Alfred & Emily" is one more exception in an exceptional career.' The Guardian 'Powerful!a page-turning narrative...a remarkable achievement!he very structure of Alfred & Emily brilliantly interrogates the shadow of empire and war -- the contrast between what actually happened, and what might have been.' The Independent 'Triumphant...heartbreaking...in this extraordinary valediction, she challenges the impossibility of escaping what we were born with.' Scotland on Sunday 'Simply the book that Lessing, 90 next year, was compelled to write next...in Alfred & Emily Lessing has found her way to an old and difficult truth. People are what they are, but what they are is also, at least in part, what they might have been.' Daily Telegraph 'Has the freshness, clarity and emotional acuity that made her first novel "The Grass is Singing" so outstanding!a tribute to a remakrable childhood, and a poignant memoir of the mother whose greatest legacy to her daughter was an invaluable gift for storytelling.' Literary Review 'One of the strangest books you will ever read.' Mail on Sunday 'This tale has a quality at once dreamy and wooden, like beautifully carved wooden dolls!vividly and urgently written!makes us think!about the moral and emotional power of different ways of telling a story.' Financial Times 'Vivid, turbulent, raw with emotion.' Sunday Telegraph 'Quietly extraordinary!this perfectly crafted book is, as Lessing knows, the latest instalment of a remarkable payback.' The Observer 'This tale has a quality at once dreamy and wooden, like beautifully carved wooden dolls...vividly and urgently written...makes us think...about the moral and emotional power of different ways of telling a story.' Financial Times 'Lessing's vivid, ambivalent memories of what is now Zimbabwe are fascinating.' Evening Standard 'Engaging, sympathetic and wise!offers a vivid and often charming picture of Lessing's childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia!he memoir is a gem, full of keen observation, vivid memories comment and reflections!read it yourself; you will find it very rewarding; a delight also.' The Scotsman 'Powerful!it is fascinating to see (Lessing) focus so sharply in her new book on what must be for us all, the most intimate of personal narratives: our parents' lives, what they were, or might have been.' The Times 'Intriguing!the first part!has many fascinating features!the second part!burns into vivd being as it re-examines Lessing's African childhood.' Sunday Times 'Vivid, turbulent, raw with emotion.' Sunday Telegraph Praise for Doris Lessing: 'She's up there in the pantheon with Balzac and George Eliot. We're lucky she's still writing.' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent 'She has an extraordinary feeling for the peculiar vulnerabilities of the young and the elderly. And her portraits of human relationships are of quite staggering beauty.' Ruth Scurr, The Times 'Doris Lessing has changed the way we think about the world.' Blake Morrison Praise for 'The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog': 'Lessing pierces the heart with the half quotations that Dann's scribes scribble down as the books fall to dust in their hands ! Lessing has much wisdom to impart although she is astute enough not to preach but to pose some unsettling questions.' Maggie Gee, Sunday Times

Scotsman
'Full of keen observation, vivid memories comment and reflections...read it yourself; you will find it very rewarding; a delight also.'


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5 Reviews 5 star:  (3) 4 star:  (2) 3 star:    (0) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:    (0)           Average Customer Review 4.6 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   19 of 19 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Two lives, imagined and remembered......, 7 Jun 2008 By  Graeme H (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews I must declare a bias; Lessing has been my favourite writer for years, and since she has declared that this may well be her last book, I was predisposed to love 'Alfred and Emily'. Bias aside though, this is an intriguing and poignant addition to what Mrs Lessing has written about her parents - Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeigh - in previous works of biography and fiction. The book is in two sections: a novella which opens in 1902 and explores the lives of Alfred and Emily in a world spared the misery of World War I; and a short biographical piece which tells the story of how these two people actually met and lived, their lives defined and ruined by this same event. The novella is a character study. It is not so much concerned with the details of how the world would have been different without the Great War, but how the characters of these two people would have developed had they not been savaged by it and thrown together to live in circumstances for which they were not well suited. Alfred and Emily meet in the novella, but they do not marry each other - Lessing writes herself out of existence. Alfred lives the life of the English farmer he had always wanted to be; Emily becomes a nurse (as she did in life), marries a doctor (perhaps like the fiance she lost in the war), is widowed early and becomes a formidable educator. The novella is really a series of sketches which skip ahead in time quickly but nevertheless create a strong sense of who these two might have been, or really were before their futures were taken from them. The second half of the book follows the story familiar to Lessing's readers. Alfred Tayler was seriously injured in the trenches and was nursed back to health by Emily McVeigh, who had lost her fiance when his boat was sunk in the English Channel. They married, moved to Persia (as it was then), where Lessing was born in 1919, and then moved to the former Rhodesia in 1924 after having been enticed there by a stall at the Royal Exhibition in London. With characteristically muscular prose, Lessing evokes the tragedy of her parents lives. She does this without a false note or a shred of sentimentality. She is hard on her mother and just as hard on herself. The contrast between Alfred farming in the Sussex of the novella and the African veld could not be more stark. She builds, through a series of fragments, a vivid and deeply moving work. Her recounting of a conversation with her dying brother is remarkable both for its directness and the sense she conveys of how deeply we can misunderstand our own lives and those of the people around us. Some critics do not fully appreciate Lessing's brilliance as a stylist; they have a tendency to focus on what she says to the exclusion of how she says it. Philip Hensher disagrees. Writing in the Spectator in 2001 about the characteristic Lessing sentence (in a review of The Sweetest Dream), he had this to say: "The Lessing sentence is blunt, quickly veering from concrete facts to abstract nouns, tempted briefly by the possibilities of rhapsody, but always turning back to the urgency of the urban demotic. It is swift to add qualifications, it startles with the frankest colloquiallisms. Its cadences are punchy, even if the clauses tend to multiply - 'she felt x, but not quite x, but rather y, as if y on longer did for her or ever really had (I pastiche). These delicate, certain distinctions between abstract states are contained with the simplest references to physical facts - she loves the grand, dramatic force of words like wisdom, and the vivid simplicity of the names of colours". Alfred and Emily is full of writing of the type Hensher describes. I first read Doris Lessing as a 14 year old boy in 1972. I have read her constantly over the 36 intervening years, whether she has been writing science fiction, biography or 'realist' novels. For me, she is the most intriguing of artists - she gives not the slightest nod to literary fashion, she trusts her own instincts, she pushes language and form. At almost 90, Alfred and Emily is a fine addition to almost 60 years of writing. I know I'm being greedy, but I hope it's not her last book. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   3 of 3 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars A daughter's retelling, 5 Jul 2008 By  Lynette Baines (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)       This is an interesting mix of fiction & non fiction. The first half is a fictional idea of what the lives of Lessing's parents (the Alfred & Emily of the title) could have been like if they hadn't married, and if WWI hadn't disrupted their lives. They meet, but marry other people and are fulfilled in different ways. Lessing feels that WWI blighted their lives, and had an effect on her own life as well. "That war, the Great War...squatted over my childhood...And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Her father lost his leg & met her mother when she was nursing at the Royal Free Hospital. They emigrated to Rhodesia, but it wasn't a great success. Alfred really wanted to be an English farmer in Surrey & Emily's great love was killed in the war, and her life after that was really only second best & full of regrets. The second half of the book is a memoir of Alfred & Emily's real lives. Lessing has written about her African childhood before, in her autobiographies & the Martha Quest series of novels. Here, though, she focuses more on her parents' experiences of struggle & hardship, & the result is a moving account of two people who could have been happier if world events had left them untouched. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: 4.0 out of 5 stars What If?, 19 Aug 2008 By  Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)       This work is a little like looking at an endless series of reflections in multiplied mirror images. Although the book is ostensibly about Ms. Lessing's parents, you feel a quest for her self-identity in every sentence. She seems to have a sort of survivor's remorse for having prospered in literature after having sprung, almost miraculously, from the stunted roots of her parents' shattered dreams. The book opens with a novella in which Ms. Lessing imagines what her parents' life would have been like if World War I had not occurred and her mother had married the doctor of her dreams. From there, Ms. Lessing provides a brief note about the Royal Free Hospital from The London Encyclopedia. In Part Two, Ms. Lessing recounts the lives her parents lived after they married and her youth in Rhodesia. The pain of World War I is so great that Ms. Lessing has trouble incorporating it into the novella or the nonfiction narrative. Clearly, the demands on her father, a badly wounded soldier, and her mother, an overwhelmed nurse dealing with casualties shipped fresh from the front, created more than the straw that broke the camel's back of normalcy. From that point of view, it's an antiwar book more than anything else. What would her parents' great energy have led them to do in the alternative? She sees her father as a successful small-scale English farmer, rather than a failed Rhodesian one. She sees her mother emerging as a force behind better education rather than as a woman who is felled by a breakdown in Rhodesia. It's natural to think of your parents as heroes and heroines, but that must be most difficult when their heroism mainly consisted of dealing with pain and frustration. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is to contemplate your own parents and to ask, "How would their lives have turned out differently if . . . ?" From there, you can cogitate all you want about the effect on whether you would have been born . . . and how you would have been different. In a sense, it's a play on the common childhood fantasy of believing that one is a royal orphan who has been placed with commoners for safekeeping before the evil contenders for the throne can kill you. Is it interesting? Yes. Is it something you must read? No. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 5 customer reviews...		Most Recent Customer Reviews 4.0 out of 5 stars Impressive and engaging With this novel, Doris Lessing proves that writers may experiment with form, content, plot and narrative even as they approach their 100th year. Read more Published 1 month ago by Samiam 5.0 out of 5 stars Great reflective social history that will make you cry. I am also a Lessing fan and welcomed this return to the topic of her mother Emily. I wept twice reading this book (note pages 170-171) the descriptions of Emily's nursing... Read more Published 10 months ago by Bookmuncher Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews › See all 5 customer reviews...

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