Literary Half-Lives (PDF)

Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American University, USA. She is the author of the pioneering study The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979). Her other books include Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (1987); Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction (2001); and Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (2009). She has published more than thirty scholarly articles and book chapters on twentieth-century women writers, including Woolf, Lessing, Morrison, Atwood, Drabble, and others.

“Roberta Rubenstein’s excellent Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à clef, which draws on substantial new archival research to illustrate that the literary borrowings … between Lessing and Sigal went farther than scholars realize. The book is, to mind, as essential a contribution to Lessing Scholarship … .” (Drew Patrick Shannon, Doris Lessing Studies, Vol. 33, December, 2015)

"Literary Half-Lives is a scrupulously researched and riveting account of two major literary talents whose mutual influence led to their 'literary half-lives' in one another's works." - Washington Independent Review of Books

"Roberta Rubenstein intends her book to be more than a kiss-and-tell; she wants the story of these stories to open up larger questions about obsession and creativity, about the ethics of writing a roman à clef, and the impossibility of locating a single '"true" version of any experience.'" - Times Literary Supplement

"A pleasure to read. A rich accounting of the ways in which the ingredients of life - especially and complexly recounted in journals - are then transformed into fiction or drama. Readers of The Golden Notebook who remember Anna Wulf's reading of her American lover's journal will be intrigued by Rubenstein's review of Clancy Sigal's long-lived obsession - in his work and in his journals - with this particular incident." - Florence Howe, Professor Emerita of English, CUNY Graduate Center, USA and author of A Life in Motion (CUNY at Feminist Press)

"Roberta Rubenstein deftly explores the double helix of intertwined literary lives, teasing open the delicate braid of love, influence and competition. Her insight let's the reader peer through the kaleidoscope of culture, in a particular time and place and record the impact of social history as lived and written about by Lessing and Sigal, and as the kaleidoscope slowly turns the reader sees things in a new and luminous light." - A.M. Homes, Princeton