A Small Personal Voice
Lessing on the novelist obligation: neither propaganda nor retreat, but a small personal voice saying honestly what it knows. Long out of print, still unanswered.
Lessing’s essays and reviews on the writer’s obligation. The title piece argues that the novelist’s job is neither propaganda nor retreat, but the small personal voice speaking honestly about what it knows. Long out of print. She wrote it while leaving the Communist Party, and the essay carries the weight of someone working out in public what a writer owes to politics and what politics cannot ask.
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Maria Popova
In what would become the title essay of her collection A Small Personal Voice (public library) — an out-of-print treasure I chanced upon at a used bookstore in Alaska — she writes:
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