I was worried about Doris Lessing's Martha Quest series, partly because the heroine was treated with so conscientious a harshness, so honorable a lack of self-indulgence that she gave the impression of being a repellent person; and partly because the discipline of an overtly political framework destroyed a great deal of the writer's intuitive flexibility. With these short stories, under the title The Habit of Loving, I am no longer in any doubt whatsoever that Mrs Lessing is one of the best writers in England, male or female.

There are seventeen stories in the books, two pretty long and the rest fairly short. The title story is about an ageing theatrical rake who marries a young actress. His heart is broken when, after an affair with a partner younger than herself (Mrs Lessing, mistress of the intuitive art of knowing-and-not-knowing, merely lets us sense what the trouble is), she decides to grow old ungracefully and with brutality. The gulf between the generations today has never been more remorselessly explored; it is not simply observed, it is felt in the bone. In The Day Stalin Died, Mrs Lessing startles by being funny. It is, at bottom, a sad, even an elegiac story, and nobody ought to laugh at the misery of poor Comrade Jean; but how grimly funny—it's no good, one must laugh—it all is!

Mrs Lessing, who appears to be abandoning the littérature engagée for the littérature engagée dans la vie, has never written better nor shown so fully the range of her literary capacities. She is not one of those political writers who has reneged on her fundamental beliefs. Such modifications as they have undergone have strengthened, not weakened, her humanist outlook, with the result that she no longer has to strain herself to put these beliefs over. They have become part of her nature rather than merely a part of her social conscience; and she is at liberty how to demonstrate that whatever is true whether it is about love or pain or pleasure, is part of the whole truth, and not merely some trivial personal indulgence lying outside it.