Book description
As resonant with social and political themes as Lessing's masterpiece
'The Golden Notebook', 'The Diaries of Jane Somers' sees the author
returns to the realism of her early fiction with the wisdom and
experience of maturity.
The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine
editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort. But her real
inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die
from cancer and Jane feels strangely disconnected. In an attempt to fill
this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and
squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the
magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other - Maudie
delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to
care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman.
First published by Michael Joseph in 1984 under a pseudonym as 'The
Diary of a Good Neighbour' and 'If the Old Could…', 'The Diary of Jane
Somers' contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young
as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate,
who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. Jane realises that she
understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.
Doris Lessing was the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and
is one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth
century. Her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing' was published in 1950,
and since then her international reputation has flourished. Among her
other celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Summer Before
the Dark', and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. Her most recent works include
two volumes of autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the
Shade', her most recent novel is 'The Cleft'.
