[In the following excerpt, Kalnins outlines the narrative structure of Walking in the Shade, briefly describing Lessing's career.]

‘If you travel from the southern frontier of the Sudan to the Cape of Good Hope, a journey of nearly three thousand miles, you will not spend a single minute in a country which has chosen its own government’, wrote T. R. M. Creighton in his classic The Anatomy of Partnership. It was in this world that Doris Lessing spent her childhood and youth and which she recounts with such brilliant clarity, immediacy, and passion in the first volume of her autobiography Under My Skin. The eagerly awaited second volume [Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962] begins with her arrival in war-damaged London in 1949 at the age of ‘nearly thirty’ with a small child in tow, £150, and the manuscript of her first novel. In dramatic contrast to the haunting beauty of the Rhodesian landscape she had left behind, this was a bleak world of postwar food-rationing, low national vitality, and poverty, and if Mrs Lessing unflinchingly describes the hardships of those difficult first months living in a small flat in Denbigh Road, she also conveys the resilience and humour, the tough self-sufficiency and warmth of the times and the growing sense of optimism and hope for the future: ‘A New Age was dawning, no less. Socialism was the key’ (11). These early months saw the publication of The Grass Is Singing and the genesis of Martha Quest. The brief opening section also functions as a prelude to the three main narrative divisions of this volume, each spanning four years during which the author lived in three different houses. The story of the inner and outer lives, of the woman and the writer, is thus shaped and structured by the motif of Woolf's ‘a room of one's own’.

The years in the second flat at Church Street Kensington saw her vigorous return to and engagement with ‘international politics, communists, the comrades, passionate polemic, and the rebuilding of Britain to some kind of invisible blueprint, which everyone shared’ (19), important themes in the fiction of the period, Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. The spacious third floor flat in Warwick Street, with the security of its protected tenancy—This was the first place I could call mine (137)—is the setting for Mrs Lessing's meticulously honest recollection of the atmosphere of the Cold War, the emergence of African nationalism (many of whose leaders were visitors and friends), the political, social, and economic struggles in eastern Europe, the lively artistic and intellectual life of London, and the writing of A Ripple in the Storm, while the fourth flat in Langham Street deals with the years which witnessed the Aldermaston Marches, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the writing of The Golden Notebook and Landlocked, and the beginning of much that is now associated in the popular imagination with the sexual revolution. In each period Mrs Lessing conveys the events, people, and concerns of the era with astonishing precision and detail, compelling the reader's belief in and admiration for the artistic intelligence which has re-created that past world.

Keenly aware of ‘the extraordinary slipperiness of memory’ (61)—how events and interpretations can be recollected so differently by different people—Mrs Lessing also speaks of the impossibility of ever fully conveying the richness, complexity, and mysterious ‘truth of the process of writing’ (94). The record of outward happenings can be no more than a ‘scaffolding, a framework, into which fits the interior life … Impossible to describe a writer's life, for the real part of it cannot be written down’ (92). At the same time that narrative cannot fail to illuminate much about the author and the inner story of the writing, for the choice of which images are called up by the selective memory and how these are ordered are themselves revealing, offering an insight into the writer's being. And although no account can convey the full essence of that being, yet through the art of re-creating what Conrad called ‘the moving moment’, the traced pathway of a unique artistic life does begin to emerge. Writing of The Golden Notebook Mrs Lessing observes that its genesis lay in her ‘wanting to write a chronicle of the times. And that is where, if the book lasts at all, its value will be found. For I do think … it is an honest and truthful and reliable account of how we all were at that time’ (315). Her words are even more apt as both a description of and a tribute to the absorbing narrative of those years and of the compassionate vision and powerful moral intelligence which inform the second volume of her autobiography.