Alfred and Emily (2008): Speculation in the Aftermath of Empire

Born in the ruinous aftermath of the First World War, raised in southern Africa during the final years of the British Empire and emerging as a writer immediately after the Second World War, Doris Lessing’s memoirs and autobiographies bear witness to life on the hinges of history. Throughout her career Lessing was drawn to the Rhodesian veld of her childhood, writing and rewriting her memories of white settler society. While the autobiographical content of novels such as the Children of Violence (1952–69) series, and The Golden Notebook (1962) leads some critics to discuss these texts as life writing, Lessing’s considerable body of autobiographical non-fiction – from her earliest travel memoir Going Home (1957) to the final account of her childhood in Alfred and Emily (2008) – also stage frequent returns to her memories of colonial life.1 These memoirs and autobiographies track a series of contradictions, for although Lessing felt that the Southern Rhodesian landscape was ‘her myth country’, she remained fiercely critical of ‘the paranoia, the adolescent sentimentality [and] the neurosis’ of white settler society. The circuitous journeys home to Southern Rhodesia made throughout her autobiographical writings, underscore how Lessing’s life writing project is processual; her memoirs and autobiographies return to but are unable to surpass her memories of colonial life. By here returning to Lessing’s final rendition of her upbringing in Alfred and Emily, I track how her abiding preoccupation with colonialism – her entanglements with the British Empire and its aftermath – registers in the form, as well as the content of her life writing.