BOOKS
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parenthood and vocational self-definition. It is not surprising that she is not
engaged, as earlier Lessing heroines in
The Grass is Singing, The Golden
Notebook,
the "Martha Quest" series, and others of her novels were, by
issues of race, poli tics, or the social experience of gender. She has been a
widow for thirty years and has not taken a lover for-perhaps-twenty. Her
children are grown up and distant on other continents. She visits her
mother in the country a few times a year, but there is no real communica–
tion there. Her only familial connection close at hand in London is a
brother, Hal, whom she has never liked and sees as little as possible. There
is also a niece, his dysfunctional daughter, who clings to Sarah for comfort
when she returns from her forays into the drug world-but this relation is
more annoyance than attachment, and she has pretty nearly cast it off. As
for vocation-twenty years ago she had a rough time earning her living in
various ways, but for a long time now she has enjoyed her role as a play–
wright and the manager of a respected small theater company. Sarah's best
support comes from the habit of work and the friendship of the theatrical
colleagues with whom she has been united for years. Yet the question,
"What now, what next?" turns out to concern the survival of a capacity to
experience the
coup deJoudre,
the lightning bolt of love-to lose one's head
over some desirable other, whatever good sense counsels. After years of
placid celibacy she is precipitated not once but twice into the brief mad–
ness of erotic obsession.
Like the story of Anna Wulf, the protagonist of
The Golden Notebook,
Sarah's experience is doubled by that of an imagined woman about whom
she is writing. But whereas Ella, the heroine of Anna's novel, is of Anna's
own time and condition, Sarah brings to the stage of her theater a roman–
tic episode of the last century. Her subject is a woman whose life had been
utterly unlike her own. Julie Vairon was the beautiful and gifted daughter
of a French plantation owner and his mulatto mistress on the island of
Martinique. She fell in love with an army officer who took her with him
back to France; she lost him to a wife chosen by his family, and fell again
even more deeply in love with a young aristocrat in the neighborhood. He,
too, was unable to marry her-and she stayed on, a hermit in the woods,
earning her living by tutoring, writing music, painting, and keeping an
extraordinary journal. She was still young and beautiful when an amiable
master printer wanted to marry her. On the brink of this conventional clo–
sure to a nineteenth-century novel, she drowned herself, leaving no
explanatory note behind. Now, three-quarters of a century later, her music
is rediscovered and performed, her journals are published, and she has
become a cult figure.
When a play about her is proposed, the members of Sarah's theater team
chant, dismissively, at first, "She was poor but she was honest,victim of a rich
