Through close readings of Doris Lessing's novels from The Grass is Singing to The Fifth Child, Margaret Moan Rowe maps many of the literary and cultural negotiations that make Doris Lessing both a maverick and a mainstream novelist. Examining the pull of paternal and maternal biographical and literary identification in Lessing, Rowe relates them to the tensions between the ordinary and the visionary in her fiction.

Acknowledgements
A Note on Editions
General Editors' Preface
The Far Countries: Lessing's Early Years
Two Versions of an African Girlhood: The Grass is Singing and Children of Violence
The Sex War: Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage and The Golden Notebook
'Charting the New Territory': The Four-Gated City
Parables of Inner Space: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark, and The Memoirs of a Survivor
'Many a Planet by Many a Sun': Canopus in Argos Reentry: The Diaries of Jane Somers, The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child
'The Battle of the Books': Lessing and the Critics
Notes Selected
Bibliography
Index.