[In the following review, Bell discerns a thematic departure in Love, Again from Lessing's typical treatment of love.]

The title of Doris Lessing's latest novel [Love, Again] refers, most apparently, to her heroine's reluctant re-experience of emotions she had thought, at sixty-five, to have put well behind her. Sarah Durham finds that she can still burn with desire, writhe with sexual jealousy, grieve at love's frustration—and no less than when she was young. She is not ready for the acquiescence of Colette's Léa who lets herself go gently into loveless age in The Last of Chéri. The title also refers, I think, to Lessing's latest novel itself as novel, that literary form which includes so much besides a love story but often seems to express the whole of human destiny by means of a “romance”—a word with cognates in other languages (German or French Roman) that mean what we do by the word “novel.” Novelists must, it seems, always write about love, however much other subjects, other kinds of human experience, claim their primacy. Yet, after all her own efforts in previous books to show how sexual passion is woven into the web of social experiences, Lessing submits in her latest to the tunnel vision of the love-possessed. She has laid aside her habitual concern—in nearly twenty long fictions—to find a total vision of human history through either realist chronicle or prophetic fantasy.

Sarah Durham's very time of life puts her beyond the struggles of youth and early maturity when sex involves the challenges of marriage and parenthood and vocational self-definition. It is not surprising that she is not engaged, as earlier Lessing heroines in The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook, the “Martha Quest” series, and others of her novels were, by issues of race, politics, or the social experience of gender. She has been a widow for thirty years and has not taken a lover for—perhaps—twenty. Her children are grown up and distant on other continents. She visits her mother in the country a few times a year, but there is no real communication there. Her only familial connection close at hand in London is a brother, Hal, whom she has never liked and sees as little as possible. There is also a niece, his dysfunctional daughter, who clings to Sarah for comfort when she returns from her forays into the drug world—but this relation is more annoyance than attachment, and she has pretty nearly cast it off. As for vocation—twenty years ago she had a rough time earning her living in various ways, but for a long time now she has enjoyed her role as a playwright and the manager of a respected small theater company. Sarah's best support comes from the habit of work and the friendship of the theatrical colleagues with whom she has been united for years. Yet the question, “What now, what next?” turns out to concern the survival of a capacity to experience the coup de foudre, the lightning bolt of love—to lose one's head over some desirable other, whatever good sense counsels. After years of placid celibacy she is precipitated not once but twice into the brief madness of erotic obsession.

Like the story of Anna Wulf, the protagonist of The Golden Notebook, Sarah's experience is doubled by that of an imagined woman about whom she is writing. But whereas Ella, the heroine of Anna's novel, is of Anna's own time and condition, Sarah brings to the stage of her theater a romantic episode of the last century. Her subject is a woman whose life had been utterly unlike her own. Julie Vairon was the beautiful and gifted daughter of a French plantation owner and his mulatto mistress on the island of Martinique. She fell in love with an army officer who took her with him back to France; she lost him to a wife chosen by his family, and fell again even more deeply in love with a young aristocrat in the neighborhood. He, too, was unable to marry her—and she stayed on, a hermit in the woods, earning her living by tutoring, writing music, painting, and keeping an extraordinary journal. She was still young and beautiful when an amiable master printer wanted to marry her. On the brink of this conventional closure to a nineteenth-century novel, she drowned herself, leaving no explanatory note behind. Now, three-quarters of a century later, her music is rediscovered and performed, her journals are published, and she has become a cult figure.

When a play about her is proposed, the members of Sarah's theater team chant, dismissively, at first, “She was poor but she was honest, victim of a rich man's whim”—and see only platitude. But Sarah discovers in Julie not a banal female martyr but one who chose, though choosing to die seems hardly a very original gesture. We must take the fascination of the Julie legend as a given—for everyone in the novel soon feels it. To the reader, it must be said, Julie Vairon's character seems insubstantial. One may wonder not merely, as Sarah does, whether she might have met Cézanne in Provence, but also how she felt about many other things besides new ways of painting. As she dreamed in her cabin in the woods had this Hester Prynne never a thought about the social world that punished her for loving too romantically? Lessing provides no ‘suggestion that Julie's journals expressed anything besides love and its pangs. She does not choose to burden her image with the ideological baggage that once weighed down her former heroines or with responses to the realities that had shaped such a heroine's short life—the class society of her day, its view of women, her own mixed racial origins and the society of her colonial birthplace. When, after Sarah's play has had its success, a “Miss Saigon” musical version proves even more generally successful. One is supposed to wince—but the original tale, as far as one can tell, is not so far removed from its sentimental reduction.

The fascination of Julie's story is felt powerfully, nevertheless, not only by Sarah but by Stephen, the show's “angel,” who has literally fallen in love with the dead. To him, Julie is the ideal love object not to be hoped for in his settled life—as a rich country gentleman and philanthropist, a father and husband (his wife a good friend, though a lesbian). His strange devotion may be a sign of the mental breakdown which leads, finally, to his suicide—or else something visionary, even supernatural, a subjection to the powers of the not-so vanished past from which a ghost can emerge to become a succubus. There is, in any case, no question of his offering love to Sarah—or of her finding herself in love with him—though they are drawn close by the subject upon which they collaborate in creating the play of Julie Vairon. Rather, he is a sort of brother, such a brother as Sarah has missed. His impossible dream of love is a bizarre exaggeration of the fatality of love mania—and a caution to Sarah.

As the play shapes itself in rehearsal, the Julie story distills a sweet poison. Sarah cannot resist the flirtatious attentions of Bill, the handsome young actor who plays the part of Julie's first lover; she suspects his sincerity (he turns out to be homosexual) yet she is overcome by his golden youth, his perfect looks, his pleading charm. Recovering, she succumbs to the affectionate dependence of Henry, her young American director who returns her feelings but remains faithful to his wife. Through no restraint of her own, she remains the celibate aging person she was at the start of her ordeal; although a third young man, Andrew, who plays Julie's second lover, offers himself unconditionally, he is simply invisible to her.