Re-entry: The Diaries of Jane Somers, The Good Terrorist, and The Fifth Child

Looking over the literary terrain in Britain in the mid-1950s, Doris Lessing declared: ‘We are not producing masterpieces, but large numbers of small, quite lively, intelligent novels. Above all, current British literature is provincial’ (SPV, p. 15). That declaration was made as Lessing was in the middle of writing Children of Violence, a series that could be labelled neither small nor provincial. Twenty-three years later, Doris Lessing spoke with Christopher Bigsby and declared: The five-volume or three-volume realistic novel seems to me dead, the family novel. Well, maybe it is not dead, but I am not interested in it. I am much more interested in a bad novel that doesn’t work but has got ideas or new things in it than I am to read again the perfect small novel. I read somewhere the other day that in 1912 in China when the civil war was all around they were still writing the most exquisite little poems about apple blossom and so on, and I have nothing against exquisite little poems about apple blossom and I very much enjoy reading the small novel about emotions in the shires, but I do regard it as dead.2