Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition

According to Sprague, doubling in Lessing’s novels is a perfect correlative for the complexity and contradiction Lessing perceives as central to the private and collective human experience. Her doubles and multiples not only indicate the fracturing or the formation of identity but they also are among the several strategies used to project complex private and societal concerns. This study of Lessing’s dialectical imagination extends and revises earlier feminist approaches.

Originally published in 1987.

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This book about Doris Lessing's dialectical imagination both extends and revises earlier feminist approaches to Lessing. Claire Sprague argues that attention to Lessing's repetitions and juxtapositions of female/female and female/male doubles leads to new readings of her major novels and also establishes the importance of her undervalued texts.