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 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each 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, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel.

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

"The 2007 Nobel Prize in literature was a bloody disaster for Lessing, she recently told the BBC. This curious work — half fiction, half memoir, hampered by slapdash prose and an unfocused organization — may be the result of that unsettling time, when she said she didn't have the energy to write a full novel. The opening novella (the longer of the two pieces) is what might have become of her parents, Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh, if they had never married. The sluggish account of their parallel lives is notable mainly for Lessing's commentary on the changing economic, social and cultural mores in England before and after WWI. The second section is a rambling series of recollections that describe the family's failed farm in Southern Rhodesia. Lessing describes her mothers dominating personality, attributing her mothers smothering attention to her frustration at having given up a successful wartime nursing career and a vital social life to raise a family. Lessing's longtime readers will find little new in her autobiographical disclosures, and new readers will look in vain for the talent that won the Nobel. 11 b&w photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The 2007 Nobel Prize in literature was a 'bloody disaster' for Lessing, she recently told the BBC. This curious work — half fiction, half memoir, hampered by slapdash prose and an unfocused organization — may be the result of that unsettling time, when she said she didn't have the energy to write a full novel. The opening novella (the longer of the two pieces) is what might have become of her parents, Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh, if they had never married. The sluggish account of their parallel lives is notable mainly for Lessing's commentary on the changing economic, social and cultural mores in England before and after WWI. The second section is a rambling series of recollections that describe the family's failed farm in Southern Rhodesia. Lessing describes her mother's dominating personality, attributing her mother's smothering attention to her frustration at having given up a successful wartime nursing career and a vital social life to raise a family. Lessing's longtime readers will find little new in her autobiographical disclosures, and new readers will look in vain for the talent that won the Nobel. 11 b&w photos. A far-seeing fantasy author takes advantage of present-day trends to resurrect his supernatural detective story from 1987 as a 2008 trade paperback reprint with a brand-new hardcover sequel." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Last year, Doris Lessing, almost 88 and the outspoken, iconoclastic author of more than 50 books — novels, story collections, poetry and nonfiction — became the oldest writer to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. This year, she has published yet another volume, a clever, moving coupling of fiction and nonfiction. "Alfred & Emily" is a culmination of Lessing's ongoing interest in formal experimentation... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and the relationship between reality and imagination. It's also a testament to her ongoing literary vitality.

The real Alfred and Emily were Lessing's parents: he a clerk and veteran of the Great War, in which he lost a leg as well as dear friends; she a nurse to desperately suffering soldiers. In the aftermath of that war's horrors, they ventured from England first to Persia, where Lessing was born, and then to Rhodesia, where she spent her childhood. They hoped to improve their fortunes by farming, but like so many pioneers before them, they had a rough go of it. Emily suffered a breakdown that sent her to bed for a year, and Alfred was stricken with diabetes, which led them finally to abandon the farm.

Lessing tells their stories — pieces of which she has previously recounted in her autobiographies — in two ingenious forms: The first is a novel that imagines her parents' lives in an England that never entered World War I; the second is a true, rueful accounting of all the ways their wartime scars shaped their futures. What is most intriguing about the imaginary lives that she gives her peacetime parents is her own erasure. In this version, Alfred and Emily, though they are friends, do not marry each other. The fictional Emily, a nurse like her biographical counterpart, marries a doctor and remains childless; Alfred, a mild and playful family man, farms in rural England.

Despite the breadth of her literary interests, Lessing has often been narrowly defined or dismissed as a feminist writer. Readers who do not know her work or were not impressed by her previous forays into science fiction may be delighted to discover the Lessing of "Alfred & Emily." She tells her parents' imagined lives in a gently ironic voice that uses concision and elision to sweep through time. The narrative's old-fashioned cadences call to mind many of the authors so central to its plot: "Alfred & Emily" is filled with books, classical and popular. Even the fictional Alfred, a sportsman and not a bookworm, admits, "I always did fancy Zane Grey." The novel's attention to how consciences and sensibilities are formed through reading is an echo of Lessing's ringing Nobel Prize call for support of the struggling teachers, librarians and readers in Zimbabwe. (Lessing herself left school at the age of 14 but was able to rely on her childhood delight in reading to sustain her intellectual development.)

Emily, with her gradual recognition of the power of books and literacy, dominates the first half of "Alfred & Emily." When the fictional Emily loses her independence in marriage, the results are as constraining as they must have been for the real Emily isolated on a Rhodesian farm: "Her household allowance was generous, and so was her dress allowance: he liked her to be well dressed. But it was bitter, that moment when he handed her the money in its separate envelopes. She had earned her own living since she was eighteen, and perhaps of the by now many things that dismayed her about her marriage, it was that moment, that money, handed her with a smile, that dismayed her most."

Widowed, she struggles to regain the intellectual energy that was stilled in the doldrums of a conventional marriage. Alfred is a simpler soul who flourishes modestly in peacetime, saved from his wartime nightmares, but England without war is no Utopia. Beyond the need for women to claim their autonomy, there's class struggle to be engaged.

Indeed, in the second, nonfictional half of this book, Lessing makes clear that her own well-known Marxism and eventual split from the Communist Party were both born of her evolving understanding of her parents' and Rhodesia's sorrows. In the evocative photographs accompanying the text, her father is a handsome soldier gazing soulfully at the camera; in real life, we learn, this empathetic man gracefully endured a steady downward slide.

In nonfiction, Lessing's famous ferocity also returns: "I hated my mother," she says, the words not so much shocking as jarring, after the lengths she has gone to make the fictional Emily a moral heroine. The miracle is the transformation that fiction achieves, the way that imagining a different life for her mother allows Lessing to forgive and honor a trying but vibrant woman. Lessing's fiction, from the autobiographically inspired "The Golden Notebook" and the Martha Quest novels to the Sufi-inspired speculative fiction of her "Canopus in Argos" series, has always implicitly explored the links between her own and her characters' political, philosophical and spiritual ideas. It is fascinating to see her, at the apex of her career, explore those connections explicitly here. By imagining fairer, more decent lives for her parents, Lessing affirms that even in their failures they were worthy of attention and respect. By allowing her readers this insight into the connection between autobiography and fiction, between form and content, she reaffirms fiction's powers and possibilities.

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, writes novels, stories and essays.

Reviewed by Valerie Sayers, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

"This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir...results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic." Booklist

"[As] bracing and engaging as anything [Lessing's] written in the past 30 years." Kirkus Reviews

"It's that intimate agenda and Lessing's refusal to drift into nostalgia that make Alfred and Emily's could-have-been lives gently yet deeply moving." Minneapolis Star Tribune

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards including the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize and Prix Catalunya, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She lives in London.