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Therein, she argued for a novel based on nineteenth-century humanism and its celebration of the individual; her literary measure is “the warmth, the compassion, the humanity, the love of people which illuminates the literature of the nineteenth century and which makes all these novels [Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Turgenev] a statement of faith in man himself?” (SPV, 6). Yet even as she looks back to the nineteenth century, Lessing looks forward to the “new man about to be born” (SPV, 8). It is that sense of anticipation (a sense present even as Lessing, nearing 87 writes, of aging) that prompts Lessing to explore beyond the conventional realism that shapes her first novels and to journey into “space fiction.” That journey begins in The Four-Gated City (1969) book five of her first quintet of novels, Children of Violence.
Her willingness to try new models is not surprising because Lessing is a boundary crosser; for Lessing, change is at the heart of writing (and everything else). Thirty years after publishing “A Small Personal Voice,” Lessing wrote the essays in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987) and, once again, championed the role of writers in society. But in “When in the Future They Look Back on Us,” she moves beyond the pantheon of individual writers in “A Small Personal Voice”; rather she sees