In the constellation of post-World War II fiction, Doris Lessing shines with a most peculiar light. To describe her as a novelist and short-story writer (and occasional essayist, playwright, scenarist, and poet) seems, somehow, to be misleading; like Ayn Rand, she is an author many of whose most fervent devotees have been drawn less by the plangency of her prose or the charm of her characters than by the unabashed fervor with which she has polemicized on behalf of an idea. Precisely what that idea is, however, has been a subject of widespread misconception since the publication in 1950 of her first novel, The Grass is Singing (the story of a white African woman’s murder by a black houseboy), and particularly since the appearance of her sixth and most celebrated novel, The Golden Notebook, in 1962. That, of course, was the book that made Lessing a popular prophet: liberation-minded women on both sides of the Atlantic clutched it to their bosoms, proclaimed it their Bible, declared Lessing their Voice. To their minds, her message was, unmistakably, that in the Western world it’s hard to be a woman—however gifted, however loved, however privileged. Though Lessing, a strong feminist, sympathized with these women, she disapproved of their reading of her magnum opus. The Golden Notebook, she complained in a 1971 introduction to a new edition of the novel, is not “a tract about the sex war.” Broadly speaking, this is true; for what most of her eighteen novels have