We met up on 25th June, 2014 to discuss Doris Lessing’s Alfred and Emily (2008). The book is an interesting one in many ways and one that overtly fosters discussion. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Lessing engages with the rhetorical question of how her parents’ lives might have been different if World War I had not happened. Some of the members had read one or more novels by Doris Lessing before (The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook were both mentioned in this context), but none of the group had read Alfred and Emily before. Some members were reading Lessing for the first time. A year before the book was published, Lessing’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her comparatively recent death (November 2013), also informed the choice of book.
In the centennial anniversary year of the start of World War I, this was an interesting moment in which to discuss this book. There are other interesting topics which Alfred and Emily raises: historical issues linked to nursing and hospital care before the advent of the NHS; issues of life writing and its relationship (in this case) to fiction; questions of inter-generational tensions, especially linked to new opportunities for women; questions of colonialism linked to Lessing’s discussion of her childhood in and return to Africa. We discussed all these topics during the course of the session, which was lively throughout, but two issues dominated it.
A few of the reading group members struggled with Lessing’s decision to rewrite her parents’ lives in fictional form. The crux of this difficulty seemed to oscillate around the fact that Lessing’s choice to write an alternative life for her parents brought to the fore questions of ‘truth’ (or lack of truth) which would otherwise be out of place when reading fiction and, for some, this proved a real stumbling block. One reader repeated that she could not enjoy the book at all, because she kept thinking, while reading it, ‘But this is not true’.
That question of truth was quite closely linked to a sense of personal injustice in relation to Lessing’s portrayal of her mother and father respectively. There was a perception among reading group members that Lessing’s mother was depicted very critically (possibly over-critically) in the novel, while her father was treated disproportionately sympathetically. The family aspect of the novel was one with which all of us could identify, albeit that we might choose to identify with it from differing perspectives (as mothers, as sons, as daughters, etc.) and an energetic discussion of those issues and how they impinged on our own lives followed.
By the end of the session, although I wasn’t convinced all the group members enjoyed reading Alfred and Emily, I was pretty sure they had enjoyed telling me why they hadn’t liked it!
Professor Lucie Armitt