and walks into a much better world. Concept and creation Author Doris Lessing says this novel grew out of a "very hubristic" ambition to write an autobiography in dreams. According to Jenny Diski, Emily is partly based on Diski, who lived with Lessing for some years as an adolescent. Reception "Doris Lessing is not afraid to break through the barrier separating the mainstream from the fantastic, to let go of man's world," writes Marleen S. Barr in her essay in A Companion to Science Fiction. She argues that feminist science fiction novels such as Memoirs of a Survivor provide an alternate viewpoint that "dissolve walls that imprison women within a sexist reality." However, the warping of space and time presented in this novel led scholar Betsy Draine to label it a "failure", saying the shifts between realistic and mystical frames are impossible to follow. The New York Review of Books felt the ending, in which Emily leads the other main characters through the walls into another reality, was "reminiscent of a Technicolor fade-out into the sunset." Themes The New York Times wrote, "Lessing's message, recognizable from her previous work, is close to W. H. Auden's 'We must love one another or die'." Although we will inevitably be defeated and disillusioned, we still need to care about other people. Consciousness becomes a physical boundary represented by the wall of the narrator's home: "the rooms and garden beyond it are areas of the unconscious which she explores." The mystical dimension is given the author's tacit approval when she allows the principal characters to escape the dystopian reality by passing through the wall. Another theme is that of breakdown, both of mechanised Western culture and of adult, mechanical personality. References 1974 British novels 1974 science fiction novels Novels by Doris Lessing Dystopian novels British novels adapted into films