SOURCE: "The Heart of Me," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 41, No. 21, December 22, 1994, pp. 51-4.

Coetzee is a South African novelist, critic, essayist, and translator. In the review below, he offers a summary of Lessing's life and career, remarking on Lessing's thoughts concerning feminism, politics, sexuality, and her mother.

Presented with snapshots of the Tayler family and asked to pick out the artist or artist-to-be among them, one might at a pinch settle on the father, rather stiff and military but clearly not unintelligent; certainly not on the daughter, pleasant enough but ordinary as a loaf of bread. Yet the daughter had it in her not only to escape a future that one can almost read in her face—marriage to a decent young chap and life on a farm in Rhodesia managing servants and having babies—but also to become one of the great visionary...