The Summer Before the Dark

About Doris Lessing

“Her intelligence is formidable, her integrity monumental and her operating methods wholly uncompromising. She has not spared herself and she will not spare the reader.” – John Leonard writing in The New York Times about The Four-Gated City

“She is a writer of considerable native power, a ‘natural’ writer in the Dreiserian mold, someone who can close her eyes and ‘give’ a situation by the sheer force of her emotional energy.” – Joan Didion reviewing Briefing for a Descent into Hell in The New York Times Book Review

“Of all the postwar English novelists Doris Lessing is the foremost creative descendant of that ‘great tradition’ which includes George Eliot, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence: a literary tradition that scru- tinizes marriage and sexual life, individual psychology and the role of ideology in contemporary society.” – Richard Locke writing in The New York Times about The Temptation of Jack Orkney

“She is prophetic, but not in a vague, exhortatory, passionate mode. Her judgments are practical, based on sound observation, and her grasp of what is actually happening in the world is ministerial. She is one of the very few novelists who have refused to believe that the world is too complicated to understand.” – Margaret Drabble in Ramparts