SOURCE: Harvey, Stephanie. “Doris Lessing's ‘One off the Short List’ and Leo Bellingham's ‘In for the Kill’.” Critical Survey 5, no. 1 (1993): 66-76.

In the following essay, Harvey disavows the influence of Lessing's “One off the Short List” on Leo Bellingham's “In for the Kill.”

The practice of comparing works by different unrelated writers on ostensibly similar themes is open to fairly obvious objections, but will often serve to highlight characteristic peculiarities in the different way the subject is handled. Perhaps this will be especially so when the two writers are of different sexes and the common theme is an aspect of what used to be called the battle between the sexes.¹

Doris Lessing's ‘One off the Short List’ and Leo Bellingham's ‘In for the Kill’ are both short stories about a journalist who forces sex on a woman who does not want him and afterwards makes the humiliating discovery...