Doris Lessing's literary career spans more than four decades; consequently her texts, both fiction and nonfiction, are valuable at the most basic level as historical records that tackle the central political, spiritual, and psychological questions of the last half of the twentieth century. In most of her works Lessing's focus is on marginal characters--people living on the fringes of society, sometimes collected in resistant subcultures--whom she tends to champion as underdogs. Despite her disavowal of feminism she is perhaps most successful (and most renowned) for her portrayals of the changing female consciousness as it reacts to problems of the age. Her works display a continuing self-conscious exploration of the limits of genre and form; most of her texts work on metafictional levels.

While known primarily for her novels Lessing has written short fiction throughout her career, and it forms an integral part of her oeuvre. Her stories are...