The Story Archive

Alfred and Emily

Doris Lessing · 2008 CE · Narrative Non-fiction · English · Contemporary

Lessing first imagines the lives her parents, Alfred and Emily, might have lived had the First World War never happened, then sets against it a memoir of the marriage that the war actually made: a maimed soldier and the nurse who cared for him. The book pairs a kinder invented past with the harder real one. It was her last book, published after her Nobel Prize in 2007.

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Attributes

Genre
HistoricalWar
Theme
War & ViolenceMemory & TimeDeath & MortalitySuffering & EnduranceClass & Inequality
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
EverymanCaregiver
Form
Dual WorldNonlinear / Fractured
Symbol / motif
The Battlefield
Conflict
vs Societyvs Fate / Gods
Mode / tone
RealistElegiac
Culture / tradition
English

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