Lessing, with her young son from her political marriage to communist Gottfried Lessing in tow, arrived in London - "a clean slate, a new page - everything still to come" - in 1949. Bolstered by the largely positive reception to her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, she was determined to make for herself the life of a writer. The reality of being a single mother with very little money, in a time when single mothers were a rare commodity, was never lost on Lessing, who would struggle for years to balance her writing ambition with the exigencies of motherhood.

Predictably, Lessing fell in with the city's Communist intelligentsia, as she had back in Salisbury during the war. But she found that the party had changed along with the times and, despite her reluctant membership, she grew disdainful of much of the Communist Party's cant, particularly in regards to the incontestable virtues of the Soviet Union. She recounts a trip to Moscow as a member of the first group of Western writers invited to visit, and details her increasingly wavering involvement with the party back home. Indeed, at the core of Walking in the Shade is Lessing's powerful, insightful meditation on the allure of communism during those heady times, and the inevitable debasement of its underlying idealism that first held the attraction for so many artists and intellectuals.

In addition to her novels, short stories and essays, Lessing became involved in writing for the theatre during the years of the "Angry Young Men," whom she calls "a phenomenon entirely invented by the newspapers, the media." Counting John Osborne, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Joan Littlewood, and Kenneth Tynan among her colleagues and friends, Lessing played her part in revitalizing the English stage. Her political encounters during the decade included Bertrand Russell, Henry Kissinger, and many of the black Africans who would go on to lead their independent nations.

This fecund period would prove the inspiration for much of what Lessing wrote about in her most well-known novel, The Golden Notebook, and for this reason Walking in the Shade stands as an invaluable companion to that modern classic, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. She writes candidly here about the elusive creative process that transforms the raw material of life into imaginative art, and ruminates on the unlikely long-term success of the novel, which was roundly criticized when it first appeared. She also illuminates aspects of the novel with her reflections on two important love affairs that would figure prominently in the book, first with a Czech doctor she calls "Jack," and later with the American radical writer Clancy Sigal.

As in Under My Skin, Lessing here "reminds us of what an autobiography can do in the hands of a master" (Carol Brightman, Washington Post Book World). Frank, thoughtful, and generously conceived, Walking in the Shade continues Lessing's honest testament to the life of the committed artist.