The influence of Eliot's modernism in two early novels and autobiographies of Doris Lessing

There is deep personal and artistic empathy for T. S. Eliot's modernist poetry in Doris Lessing's early novels and two later autobiographies. As Eliot did, Lessing uses the modernist doctrine of difficulty to portray the education and development of the writer-artist as a long, problematic process, involving prodigious, rigorous, energetic reading efforts, and self-conscious reflexive writing. Lessing also frequently quotes other authors, and she thoroughly uses subverted allusive schemes and extrusive structural complications to render realism in her narratives more vividly. Her mature aesthetic sets at a distance a sense of personal displacement, exile, and uncertain cultural identity and echoes Eliot's dictum that the Poet needed to be impersonal and to seek the significant emotion. Her search for moral intelligibility by narrative framing that combines both fiction and autobiography in autobiographical space or 'pact' may also arguably be modernist.