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Harper
August 2008
On Sale: August 5, 2008
288 pages
ISBN: 0060834889
EAN: 9780060834883
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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