[In the following review, Sampson highlights the passion of Lessing's memories in Walking in the Shade.]

Of all the free spirits of London in the late 1950s, Doris Lessing appeared the most free. She seemed to have floated in from Africa with a freshness and passion which radiated both from her writing and her presence. She was separate from other cliques and backgrounds, but in the midst of radical protests, antiapartheid, anti-bomb, anti-censorship. And she wrote about everything with the directness and originality of an outsider.

It was true she was a communist, with a commitment to her causes that was first forged by her intense small group of comrades in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which she vividly described in her first volume of autobiography, Under My Skin.

But her loyalty was linked to the fight against white domination which gave the communist crusade in Southern Africa its special prestige, like anti-Nazi campaigners in the 1930s. And she lost all her faith in the Soviet Union after Khrushchev's speech in 1956, revealing the true crimes of Stalin.

She admits [in Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962] she was part of the “mass social psychopathology” which allowed communist atrocities to happen. And she recalls with some shame her naivety in accepting payment from Moscow to enable her to report from Africa, only to find that Soviet papers had reproduced her articles in Tribune, “creatively edited” to exaggerate the horrors.

She eloquently describes her disillusion: “Losing faith in communism is exactly paralleled by people in love who cannot let their dream go.”

That did not, she explains, mean losing faith in revolution, which remained part of the structure of people's minds for 20 years more—longer in southern Africa.

But communism had been only part of her faith: her “psychological eggs were not all in that basket”. What she brought to London was something much rarer and more original, an insight about human relationships and an ability to describe them with a directness and certainty that made other English writers seem effete and self-conscious.

She still writes, as she did then, with a vigour and drive that can bring together intellectual ideas and practical observation. Her style seems so natural that it is surprising to read how painfully she managed it, walking up and down smoking, writing a sentence and crossing it out. But the description of her “wool-gathering” is wonderfully evocative: “This process, this walking and thinking, while you pick up something from a chair and stare at it, hardly knowing what it is, and then let it drop, tidy something into a drawer, find yourself dusting a chair or straightening a pile of books against the wall, or standing at the window looking down while the lorries trundle past—this is the opposite of daydreaming, for it is all concentration, you are deep inside, and the outside world is merely material.”

She takes us through left-wing literary London of the 1950s and 1960s. She knew the Tynans, the Osbornes, the Weskers, dropping in and out of their lives so easily that there is no sense of name-dropping. She always has something new to say, whether about Kissinger defending his “kitten-bomb”, Tynan's collections of whips or Bertrand Russell's manipulation by Ralph Schoenman. Her closest friends, though, were not part of any establishment but oddballs such as the American Clancy Sigal or the Australian Murray Sayle who, like her, came from another world.

Her sex-drive and restlessness seemed to be the engines of her writing, driving her towards dramatic situations and giving her confident insights into lovers or bed-fellows—American tough guys, unromantic Englishmen, frustrated black admirers. She developed her own kind of feminism, with an ability to show women's views of men, which shone through her Golden Notebook. And she remained passionate about ideas.

She began to worry about becoming a “falling-in-love junkie” and her friends thought she should marry again and settle down. The turning-point was her move towards Eastern mysticism, beginning with Buddhism. She was attracted by the idea of the “Search” and the “Path”, and particularly towards the writing of Idries Shah.

She does not try to explain it, but “the Path” became “a main current in my life, deeper than any other, my real preoccupation”. The youthful Lessing of the 1950s seemed deliberately transformed into the middle-aged Lessing of the mid-1960s with a parting in the middle and sensible shoes, writing a succession of mystical books.

For many of her readers it will come as a relief that she can still look back on those wild, heady days with relish and vivid recall.