SOURCE: Kalnins, Mara. Review of Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, by Doris Lessing. Notes and Queries 46, no. 1 (March 1999): 152-53.

In the following excerpt, Kalnins outlines the narrative structure of Walking in the Shade, briefly describing Lessing's career.

‘If you travel from the southern frontier of the Sudan to the Cape of Good Hope, a journey of nearly three thousand miles, you will not spend a single minute in a country which has chosen its own government’, wrote T. R. M. Creighton in his classic The Anatomy of Partnership. It was in this world that Doris Lessing spent her childhood and youth and which she recounts with such brilliant clarity, immediacy, and passion in the first volume of her autobiography Under My Skin. The eagerly awaited second volume [Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962] begins with her arrival in war-damaged...