While I have so far concentrated on Lessing's novels, this is not to underestimate her skills in another form of fiction. For she is, like D. H. Lawrence and Catherine Mansfield, supremely gifted as a short-story writer, never wasting a word, and equally at home when presenting precisely crafted plots, incidents, meditations, dialogues, or reflective descriptions. The short story offers in sharp focus a wide range of Lessing's narrative skills and her command of language. Jargon, cliché, platitude abound, to be sure, but that is because we live in a world dominated by jargon, cliché, and platitude. Lessing deliberately exposes the limitations of such language and, as a way of exposing these limitations and how they cramp our thinking, she parodies, mirrors, and shows their effects. She has honed her skills in her poems, in her plays, and we have seen the way she uses language throughout her novels to expose, for instance, discourses of power, wherever they occur: in popular magazines, in political and bureaucratic statements, in definitions of madness and sanity, and so on. Sometimes language itself is the issue, as it is in The Sentimental Agents; but whether topic or vehicle, it is always crafted and, if there is clumsiness, discord, it is because, as in the language of Thomas Hardy, there is clumsiness, discord, to expose and express.

To take one example: what happens when language suited to one context is in danger of obscuring another? The result is demonstrated in the story ‘The Old Chief Mshlanga’, where the narrator recalls how, growing up on an African farm as a child of English parents,