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To Room Nineteen
Collected Stones Volume One
DORIS LESSING
‘The Other Woman’ was first published in Lilliput; ‘Through the Tunnel’ in John Bull; ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘The Day Stalin Died’, ‘Wine’, ‘He’, ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ and ‘The Witness’ in The Habit of Loving; and ‘One off the Short List’, ‘A Woman on a Roof’, ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’, ‘A Man and Two Women’, ‘A Room’, ‘England versus England’, ‘Two Potters’, ‘Between Men’ and ‘To Room Nineteen’ appeared in A Man and Two Women. ‘Twenty Years’ was first published in 1994 in the Daily Telegraph.
These stories have appeared previously in paperback in the following editions: ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Through the Tunnel’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘The Day Stalin Died’, ‘Wine’, ‘He’, ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ and ‘The Witness’ in The Habit of Loving; ‘The Other Woman’ in Five. The rest of the stories appear in A Man and Two Women.
Table of Contents
All these stories have lived energetic and independent lives since I wrote them, since they have been much reprinted, in English and in other languages. None has been more anthologized than ‘Through the Tunnel’, mostly for children. I often get letters from children about it, and adolescents too, for it seems that fearful swim under the rock beneath the sea expresses their situation, or is like an initiation process. It was written because I watched a nine-year-old boy, in the South of France, longing to be accepted by a group of big boys, French, but they rejected him, and then he set challenges for himself, to become worthy of them. But, curiously, when the group turned up again some days later, the English boy had proved to his own satisfaction that he did not need them. I did not set out to write the tale for children, but this raises the whole question of writing stories especially for children. Another story, or short novel, which children like, is The Fifth Child. Italian adolescents, chosen from schools all over Italy, gave it a prize over other books from different parts of the world. Who would have thought that grim tale would appeal to children?
‘The Habit of Loving’ made a brilliant one hour television film, with Eric Portman. It was written because I - then fortyish - fell in love with a handsome youth, while an eminent and elderly actor was in love with me. The reversals of sex and situation from life to fiction would make an interesting
