Alfred and Emily
By: Doris Lessing
Edition: Large print ed.
Publisher: ISIS; ISIS Large Print Books
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Oxford
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
ISBN-13: 9780753182741; 9780753182758
Subjects: Fiction; Family; World War, 1914-1918; Social aspects; History; Families
Description: "I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness." In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier life her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war, a story that begins with them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationaship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, the family's move to Africa and the impact of her parent's marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land.
Notes: Originally published: London: Fourth Estate, 2008.