It is not Mrs. Lessing's fault that, among the many secrets she knows, her knowledge of women's anger and aggression, even more than of their sexuality, took people by surprise and categorized her. That is the fault of our times and of history. But ["Stories"] should repair any misunderstanding of her timelessness, the breadth of her sympathy and range of her interests and, above all, the pleasures of reading her. Rereading these stories is like returning to a Victorian novel one loves, and affords the same delightful feeling of self-indulgence combined with self-improvement.

Mrs. Lessing is the great realist writer of our time, in the tradition of the major Continental novelists of the 19th century, particularly Stendhal and Balzac, but also Turgenev and Chekhov—a masculine tradition with which she shares large moral concerns, an earnest and affirmative view of human nature, and a dead-eye for social types...