Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Lessing, Doris (Vol. 94) - Harriet Ritvo (review date 13 January 1994)

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Harriet Ritvo (review date 13 January 1994)

SOURCE: "A Dog's Life," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, Nos. 1-2, January 13, 1994, pp. 3-4, 6.

[Ritvo is an American critic and educator whose works include The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). In the following excerpt from a review in which she also discusses the books The Hidden Life of Dogs (1994) by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Cats: Ancient and Modern (1993) by Juliet Clutton-Brock, she examines the revised version of Particularly Cats … and Rufus, arguing that Lessing implicitly criticizes "many of those who study animal behavior [and] automatically treat anthropomorphism as a weakness that distinguishes the soft-headed and the simple-minded among humans."]

Although they may not always be aware of it, pet animals are caught between worlds—members of the family, in an emotional sense, but only in very...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Katherine Fishburn (essay date Summer 1988)
   2. Virginia Tiger (essay date Autumn 1990)
   3. John Bemrose (review date 24 August 1992)
   4. K. Anthony Appiah (review date 28 June 1993)
   5. Harriet Ritvo (review date 13 January 1994)
   6. Lisa Tyler (essay date Spring 1994)
   7. Richard Eder (review date 20 October 1994)
   8. Basil Davidson (review date 22 October 1994)
   9. Michiko Kakutani (review date 1 November 1994)
   10. Caroline Moorehead (review date 4 November 1994)
   11. J. M. Coetzee (review date 22 December 1994)
   12. William H. Pritchard (review date Summer 1995)
   13. Carol Franko (essay date Summer 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright