Alfred and Emily

by: Doris Lessing

Published by: Harper (division of Harper Collins Publishers)

Reviewed by Beth Cummings

This is a somewhat unusual book. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing chose to write about her parents, Alfred Taylor and Emily McVeigh, but rather than stick to their actual lives she took the liberty in the first half of the book to imagine them as they might have been had there never been a World War I. The second half of the book deals with them as they actually were.

Lessing imagines her parents as what they seemed to have wanted to be–a farmer and a head nurse–who never married each other. The farmer had a wife and family. The nurse married a doctor who was not a very loving individual and who died young. Alfred and Emily met each other, but never were a couple, in their daughter’s imagination.

The imagined story is stilted and old-fashioned in style. Possibly because the main characters were people she knew well in other circumstances, Lessing doesn’t do much with their development. While events occur, she doesn’t really give any insight as to why the individuals behave as they do. Toward to end of the novella she finally gives them some life, but by then it is hard remain interested.

The second half of the book that tells about their real life is rather rambling and disjointed. Lessing is 87 years old and in the manner of many older people she seems to repeat herself fairly often while describing her parents’ life.

The real Alfred Taylor wanted to be a farmer, but he went to “The Great War” and lost most of his right leg from shrapnel wound. He spent a very long time in the hospital recovering and that is where he met his wife, Emily McVeigh, a nurse. She was a wonderfully talented upper-middle-class woman who decided to defy her father’s wishes and became a nurse. After the war they moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Alfred tried to farm, but nothing about the land was like the English farm of his dreams. Emily suffered from a nervous breakdown and Alfred was always suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I suspect that readers who are very familiar with Doris Lessing and her other works might find this book enjoyable. I don’t feel that it holds up well alone. Lessing seems to expect that the reader already knows a great deal about her life. That, coupled with the disjointed style, makes the book less than I had hoped for from a writer of her stature.

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