ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author looks at some of the many meanings encoded in the notion of a ‘turn to mysticism’ in Doris Lessing’s more recent fiction. She illustrates the ideas with reference to a cluster of Lessing’s writings from the late 1960s and early 1970s: her novels The Four-Gated City and The Memoirs of a Survivor, the preface to the 1971 edition of The Golden Notebook; and two essays on Sufism, ‘An Ancient Way to New Freedom’ and ‘In the World, Not Of It’. The author focuses on three main areas which are raised by her use of religious, and, most frequently, Sufi imagery. First, the question of anti-psychiatry, ‘Eastern thought’ and our own cultural history; second, the tension to be discerned between the role and meaning of Sufi and Christian imagery in her writing; and, third, some issues in the philosophy of mysticism which she want to refract through her own non-fiction writing on the subject.
