Doris May Lessing, The Sweetest Dream

Anne-Laure Brevet (University of Cambridge)

Ed. by Peter Childs, Birmingham Newman University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2001

Places

United Kingdom (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Spanning more than thirty years,

The Sweetest Dream

(2001) opens

in medias res

on a slice of life in the late 1960s. The unconventional Lennox household is run by divorced Frances who brings up her two sons Andrew and Colin in her German mother-in-law’s large house in Hampstead. Although the communist father Jolyon Lennox, renamed comrade Johnny, is thoroughly disapproved of by his own mother Julia, he regularly comes to the house to share the dinners Frances cooks for her sons and their friends, “the waifs and strays” (SW 142, 221) sheltering at the Lennoxes. As they are nonconformist teenagers who rebel against their parents’ conservative upbringing, these children are put in the hands of Johnny who is set on gaining them to the communist cause (147). One of the “disturbed”…

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1987 words

Citation: Brevet, Anne-Laure. "The Sweetest Dream". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 September 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10755, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Doris May Lessing, The Sweetest Dream

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