Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she analyzes the unraveling of the character "Julie."

"Debbie and Julie" is one of the so-called "London stories" collected in Lessing's The Real Thing. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called the eighteen pieces in the volume "splendid examples of Lessing's iridescent prose." The reviewer noted, however, that "most consist of tantalizingly unresolved scraps of character and situation." As one of these sketches, the reviewer singled out "Debbie and Julie," which is described as "a grim story about a girl who gives birth alone in a shed." This story, though long at about twenty-five pages, indeed reveals only bare scraps about its main characters and their motivations.

Although Debbie and Julie share title billing, Debbie never actually appears on the pages; away in...