The nineteen pieces which go to make up A Man and Two Women are the work of an original and scrupulous artist. Mrs. Lessing's writing is all her own. She owes little to modish theories or to popular experimenters. She sets herself a creative task and worries away at it in an absorbed, painstaking way.

Sometimes her objective seems unrewarding and you wonder why she chose it. Can the stage-designer Barbara Coles, for example, and her novel tactics with seducers really be worth all the trouble Mrs. Lessing goes to? Or is this story ("One Off the Short List") meant to be funny? (She certainly tries the light, derisive touch now and again and in "Between Men", a story about two aging semi-tarts, even goes for a rather lumbering gallop round the Maupassant country, but it isn't a vein which suits her.) Sometimes, too, in these pieces where...