Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Doris Lessing's African Stories was first published in 1964, and published in an expanded form in two volumes in 1973. The 1964 collection included stories from her first book of short fiction, This Was the Old Chief's Country (1951), and from her collection of five novellas entitled simply Five (1953). In 1977, a revised one-volume American edition included two stories not collected in earlier editions: “The Story of a Non-Marrying Man” and “Spies I have Known.” This edition of African Stories was reprinted in 1981, following the 1980 publication of Stories , in which were collected all of Lessing's non-African stories. The separate publication history of the stories set in Africa indicate that the stories stand together as a group, apart from Lessing's other short fiction, and that they are meant to be considered as a whole. A reading of the volume confirms that the stories contribute to form a general impression of the setting, and of the author's fictive response to it. The African stories are generally autobiographical in nature. Although Lessing was born as Doris Tayler in Persia (now Iran) in 1919, where her father was posted as a bank clerk in the British colonial apparatus, the family moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) in 1925, and this is where Lessing grew up and began her career as a writer. The farm was not as prosperous as had been hoped, ... log in or subscribe to read full text