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Lessing was right. British literary culture, and above all the influential taste-making apparatus of our discipline which had become institutionalised in the universities, has been hostile to the novel of ideas. Jeanne Marie-Jackson's The African Novel of Ideas (2021) follows Lessing in seeking to defend the form (a key one in African writing) against what she calls ‘Eurocentric literary standards, often limitedly rooted in psychological depth to demonstrate character development’.² In this article, I will briefly anatomise the academic hostility to the novel of ideas, then look at what Lessing's work, and her archive, can contribute to our understanding of the form. These are rich resources that prompt a rethinking of the tradition of the novel of ideas and may help us to overcome some of the parochialism of which Lessing accuses us.

Novels of ideas give a central position to staged debates between characters about political, social, religious or philosophical ideas. Such debates were a normal feature of Victorian novels by the likes of George Eliot, Samuel Butler and George Meredith, but the modernist generation (and perhaps above all Henry James) rejected it. James accused George Eliot's novels of being ‘too clever by half’ and set out to write ‘some little exemplary works of art’ that would have ‘less “brain” than Middlemarch’ but ‘more form’.³ Novelists of ideas like H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton and Rose Macaulay were cast aside, as were the great Russian novelists of ideas, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (James called their books ‘fluid puddings’). Henry James, abetted by F.R. Leavis and others, established an agenda for the novel that prioritised psychological realism, rich characterisation, and the romantic and financial doings of the upper-middle class.

What is remarkable is the extent to which the animosity towards the novel of ideas persists in the contemporary academy, even while the marketplace proves more forgiving: writers including Zadie Smith, Kamila Shamsie and Ian McEwan have found popular success this century with novels of ideas. Sianne Ngai's recent Theory of the Gimmick (2020) takes on the form, arguing that novels of ideas are gimmicky because of the awkward way in which they incorporate ‘readymade’ ideas into the text, which operate as a ‘“transportable intellectual unit,” a deja là or self-standing proposition’.⁴ For Ngai, many of the characteristic formal devices of the novel of ideas – she lists ‘Allegory, direct speech by narrators, and direct speech by characters’ – are in fact ‘ancient didactic devices’ that work to ‘distance the novel from its métier – narration – and systematically push its form closer to those of the essay, lecture, or play’.⁵

The generic hybridity that Ngai finds gimmicky raises important questions about the relationship between a writer's archive and their fictional work. As readers of novels of ideas, w

In 1998, having just published the second volume of her autobiography, ‘Walking in the Shade,’ Doris Lessing appeared at the University of East Anglia's Literary Festival for the third time in a decade. At the end of the interview while still on mic, following audience questions and during rapturous applause, her interviewer and friend, Professor Christopher Bigsby, asked Lessing if he could announce what they had just been discussing regarding her papers. Lessing gave a firm no in response.¹ Privately, Lessing had told Bigsby that she had decided to bequeath her personal correspondence and working papers to the University of East Anglia (UEA). Bigsby had known Lessing since 1980 when he first interviewed her at the BBC. They had formed a friendship, and Lessing had already made several trips to UEA campus to work with students. Bigsby, who had researched the embargoed Arthur Miller Archive at the Harry Ransom Center during the writing of his two-volume biography, understood the incredible generosity and magnitude of this surprising gift. Literary archives of preeminent writers can command vast sums. Lessing had already sold her manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center and could have sold her correspondence. This generosity is entirely in keeping with Lessing the benefactor who, it is clear from her archived private correspondence, quietly made a very large number of generous charitable gifts during her lifetime, giving regular sums of money to friends, associates and organisations, even paying for several children's school fees throughout their education.

However, the news of Lessing's planned donation was not universally celebrated at UEA. The announcement caused considerable anxiety within the university library, with the then Librarian rightly concerned that UEA's modest infrastructure would not do justice to such a high-profile deposit. While Faculty staff lobbied for the proposed gift to be acknowledged as soon as possible, Lessing confirmed the arrangement in her will. The Librarian of the day was overruled by stealth. The infrastructure was upgraded in 2005 and officially opened by the novelist, Rose Tremain, in 2006.

In November 2007, Francis Fitzgibbon, the stepson of Lessing's lover, John Whitehorn, deposited the first Lessing material at UEA - 110 love letters written by Lessing in her mid to late 20s to Whitehorn and his friend, Col McDonald between 1945 and 1949, mostly from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with the final few written from London shortly after her arrival. The letters, often thousands of words in length, are an extraordinary account of Lessing's writing, politics and motherhood. Both correspondents were RAF officers. At the time of the deposit in 2007, Lessing remarked on her decision not to re-read them: ‘There is a good deal of pain in those long ago far-away things’.² Correspondence to a third RAF officer, Leonard Smith, was sold by Smith to Sussex University in the mid-1990s. Th

In March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic had just begun to ravage through Italy and would soon sink its already struggling economy, the spectre of past divisions and internal fragmentations in the European project resurfaced with glaring clarity. As finance ministers of EU countries commenced discussions about a series of coordinated measures to support the economic recovery of member states, Northern European ministers and economists voiced their unease at supporting a plan that, they claimed, would bail out countries that had been fiscally irresponsible¹ – in a telling echo of the accusations which, ten years earlier, had led to the imposition of austerity measures and structural adjustment programmes in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Once again, at a time of profound crisis, the presumed cohesion of Europe around a common horizon was faltering under the weight of long-standing internal cracks. After weeks of discussion – and when it became evident that the pandemic would have impacted economies beyond Southern Europe – a €750 billion recovery plan, wishfully called Next Generation EU, was approved. Nonetheless, this moment stands as a powerful reminder that, whenever the rhetoric of unity gets silenced by deep-rooted assumptions and stereotypes, the perceived or imposed divide between Europe's North and its multiple Souths abruptly re-emerges from the European unconscious.

Like the debt crisis of 2010 and the refugee crisis of 2015, the Covid-19 pandemic has been another (yet surely not the last) trigger of ‘a larger epistemic crisis’ at the heart of the European project.² This crisis permeates political institutions, cultural spaces, and the European mediascape – but it also determines, as Chloe Howe Haralambous lucidly shows in her essay in this special issue, who deserves to be rescued at sea. In Howe Haralambous's account, the ‘rescue plot’ of migrant crossings in the Mediterranean crystallises ‘contradictory political impulses’ at the heart of Europe's regimes of bordering and exclusion. In what follows, I set out to disentangle the historical and ideological foundations of those impulses. My central contention is that, even to begin to articulate what a place called ‘Europe’ might be, we need to look at its history, present, and future beyond paradigms of progress, security, or idealistic cohesion, and address instead its fissures, contradictions, and uneven histories. To do so, this essay calls for an epistemic reorientation towards Europe's South and the Mediterranean as liminal spaces that have become the epicentres of Europe's interconnected crises, having always sat uncomfortably within continental ideas of homogeneity. Such reorientation seems particularly important today because, first, theorising from these spaces requires ‘a persistent attention to the postcolonial dimension of the borders of “Europe” and the boundaries of “European”-ness’;³ and second, because this attentio

Doris Lessing was a prolific letter writer. Her personal archive in the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at UEA includes a huge range and volume of material: 130 boxes amounting to thousands of pages of letters, faxes, notebooks, postcards, notebooks, dream diaries and other personal papers. There is more correspondence (as well as a significant number of literary manuscripts) at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and a small but significant tranche at The Keep, University of Sussex, not to mention letters from Lessing held in several of her correspondents' archives. These letters present a complex and fascinating resource of paratextual material which enriches and challenges our reading of her published works.

I came to Lessing's letters through her correspondence with Muriel Spark, in which they articulate and negotiate experiences of being ageing women writers. I was struck by the clarity and immediacy of Lessing's letter-writing voice and by the capacious inclusivity of the form. My interest in the scholarly possibilities of her personal archive was deepened by subsequent work on the Centenary Exhibition of her archive materials in 2019. This exhibition, curated together with Matthew Taunton and Justine Mann, was key in opening up Lessing's personal archive to scholars and members of the public. It revealed Lessing's extraordinary creative and intellectual journey, which saw her move to London from Southern Rhodesia, travel to communist Russia, visit refugee camps in Afghanistan, grapple with Sufism and feminism and meet with NASA scientists. Since then, convinced of the material, historical and literary importance of letters as a specific mode of writing, I have begun the daunting task of collecting, editing, transcribing and annotating Lessing's letters.

As Edwina Preston's recent ‘Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting “the full catastrophe of life”’ rightly notes, letters are particularly revealing of women's writing, enabling us to see the ‘unspooling of self onto the page in real time’ as well as their writers' networks and their engagement with the world around them. Preston celebrates the democratic, responsive and eclectic nature of the letter-writing form, where ‘hierarchies of value don't prevail’, and she laments the ‘disappearance of letter-writing from Western cultural life’ in a digital age, reminding us that this context sharpens the ‘disarmingly tangible’ qualities of letters.¹ I too am intrigued by the material tangibility of letters, by what these documents reveal about a writer's inner life, and by how in them writing and life are negotiated through intimate engagement and dialogue with others and with the world.

In this short essay, I offer early reflections on working with Lessing's letters towards a four-volume Collected Letters edition, give a very brief overview of the project – the first volume in particular – share some