In the best stories in her new collection, A Man and Two Women, Miss Lessing has developed her feminism and her concern for contemporary issues into a … subtle and profound point of view. "To Room Nineteen," for example, does not simply depict the "failure in intelligence" that the opening line indicates. Rather, it is a meaningful story about a personal failure in marriage that represents a failure of the relationship between man and woman in our society. The woman, Susan Rawlings, having held a job and had her own apartment in contemporary London, marries, assuming that she can control her domestic world in the sane, masculine way that she controlled her job. Feeling increasingly dissatisfied, she hires a housekeeper, then a nurse girl, and retreats to rented hotel rooms—all attempts to remove the center of herself from her circumstances…. Although a man (shadowy in this story) can...