The Sweetest Dream continues Lessing’s longstanding preoccupation with the intimate connection, most insistently proclaimed in our times by radical feminists, between the personal and the political. The book may also be seen as a further and most explicit stage in Lessing’s journey of distancing herself from her old leftist convictions and from all radical-utopian beliefs. What she seeks to convey here has certainly been proposed before, by philosophers, political scientists, and clear-headed intellectuals: that there is no political or social solution for personal problems, especially for the most difficult ones. Likewise, sweeping schemes of social engineering founder on their own unintended consequences and the imponderables of human nature. The determined mixing of the personal and the political, more often than not, yields unpleasant results.

This is a novel mainly about England in the 1960s, but it spans...

 

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