A Small Personal Voice

by Lessing (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $3.29

  An essential and definitive collection of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's finest essays, reviews, reminiscences and interviews from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

  `The novelist talks as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice. In an age of committee art, public art, people may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity, and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.'

  In this collection of her non-fiction, Lessing's own life and work are the subject of a number of pieces, as are fellow writers such as Isak Dinesen and Kurt Vonnegut. There are essays on Malcolm X and Sufism, discussions of the responsibility of the artist, thoughts on her exile from Southern Rhodesia, and a fascinating memoir of her fraught relationship with her mother.

  Lit throughout by Doris Lessing's desire for truth-telling, `A Small Personal Voice' is both an important collection of writings by and a self-portrait of one of the most significant writers of the past century.