SOURCE: "Looking Back at Lessing," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 317-24.

Pritchard is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he remarks on the theme and style of Under My Skin and summarizes Lessing's development throughout her literary career.

A little over two decades ago when Doris Lessing published her ninth novel, The Summer Before the Dark (1973), she could lay claim to consideration as the foremost female writer of fiction then working in English. The women's movement was in full swing and among many of the more literarily inclined Lessing occupied a position of respect second only to Virginia Woolf. And she was contemporary in a way Woolf, thirty and more years dead, couldn't be. The Golden Notebook (1962), which met with some puzzlement when first published, had become increasingly cited and talked about (if not always read through) by those aspiring toward...