Literary Half-Lives Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman Clef [Hardcover]

While Doris Lessing was composing The Golden Notebook , she was intimately involved with Clancy Sigal and their relationship influenced the literary methods of both writers. Focusing on literary transformations, Rubenstein offers compelling insights into the ethical implications of disguised autobiography and roman ? clef .Introduction 1. Hall of Mirrors 2. Truth Values and Mining Claims 3. Plays and Power Plays 4. Will the Real Saul Green Please Stand Up? 5. A Rose by any other Name 6. Life in the Interior Zone 7. Poetic License and Poetic Justice 8. Variations on a Theme 9. Of Parent and Child Conclusion: His, Hers, Theirs

Roberta Rubensteins excellent Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman ? clef, which draws on substantial new archival research to illustrate that the literary borrowings & between Lessing and Sigal went farther than scholars realize. The book is, to mind, as essential a contribution to Lessing Scholarship & . (Drew Patrick Shannon, Doris Lessing Studies, Vol. 33, December, 2015)

Literary Half-Lives is a scrupulously researched and riveting account of two major literary talents whose mutual influence led to their 'literary half-lives' in one another's works. - Washington Independent Review of Books

Roberta Rubenstein intends her book to be more than a kiss-and-tell; she wants the story of these stories to open up larger questions about obsession and creativity, about the ethics of writing a roman ? clef, and the impossibility of locating a single ' true version of any experience.' - Times Literary Supplement

A pleasure to read. A rich accounting of the ways in which the ingredients of life - especially and complexly recounted in journals - are then transformed into fiction or drama. Readers of The Golden Notebook who remember Anna Wulf's reading of her American lover's journal will be intrigued by Rubenstein's review of Clancy Sigal's long-lived obsession -lCÇ