From the 1973 Alfred A. Knopf edition: As in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing is concerned with the situation of present-day women. In The Summer Before the Dark, her treatment of the emotional gulf that opens up before a forty-five year old woman no longer needed as a wife and mother is a starting point for much more — a confrontation with the threat of annihilation, the terrors alf old age and death.

Kate Brown is faced for the first time in twenty years with the prospect of being alone. Her children are grown; her husband, a successful neurologist, is off to America to work for some months in a hospital there.

Urged by him to take a job, she find herself acting as interpreter for an international conference on food, becoming substitute mother to all the delegates, flying off to Turkey for another conference, to Spain for an affair with a younger man — all the traditional outlets. Read More→