6 - Jane Somers and a Return to ‘Realism’

Summary

While the Canopus in Argos series was being published, Lessing was involved in a very different enterprise, exemplifying the validity of Michel Foucault's argument in his article ‘What is an Author?’ (1968), where he looks at the importance of author function in modern society as we assess texts. Certainly the name Doris Lessing carried considerable weight by the 1980s, as did the novel so regularly associated with that name that it was in danger of inviting readers to measure all her subsequent work against it: The Golden Notebook. Lessing must have thought about the role of her name in her continuing success with publishers and readers, and she must have wondered what impact books without the benefit of that name might have. She was not, of course, the first to write under another name: a number of authors have chosen different pen-names when they switched from one kind of writing to another, as when Ruth Rendell writes as Barbara Vine. There have also been those who have chosen pen-names to hide their identity: the Brontës, for instance, writing as the Bells. Storm Jameson is closer in intention to Lessing: in the midst of a successful writing career under her own name, she chose to write three novels, one as William Lamb, two as James Hill, to test how they would be received. So Lessing now wrote two novels under the name Jane Somers; it was some time before these were accepted for publication and, when her cover broke, there were a lot of recriminations. Her name, after all, was a commodity in this material age …

The first novel, The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) tells the story of a middle-aged, middle-class woman, Janna, who befriends, at first with considerable reluctance, an old working-class woman, who is lonely, living in squalor, yet full of vitality. This is a return to ‘realism’ on one level, but it also charts the growth of Janna as a person. Her meeting with old Maudie comes at a time when she is looking at herself with dissatisfaction; she admits to having shied away from her dying husband as well as her dying mother, hiding from them in her successful career as a journalist on a woman's magazine. She acknowledges that she cannot bear ‘physical awfulness’ (DGN 8).