The Habit of Loving Year First Published: 1957 First Published by: Thomas Y. Crowell Company Category: Short Stories This Edition: American first edition

From the book jacket:

Doris Lessing, the only woman in Britain's coterie of "angry men," caused a sensation in London's literary circles with the publication of the seventeen stories here gathered together.

In the sense in which James Gould Cozzens used the word, the stories are, for the most part, concerned with men and women by love "possessed." They display a wide emotional ranged, from the title story about the aging rake, George Talbot, a man of the theater who marries a young, doll-like woman, to the last story in the book, "The Eye of God in Paradise", a shattering and frightening contemporary picture of the undaunted German ego. The stories vary widely also in setting: some in Africa, from Johannesburg to the vast farms; some in London, Paris and the south of France.

Mrs. Lessing brings unrivaled artistry and technique to that most difficult of literary mediums, the short story...

• British Edition

Included in this Edition:

The Habit of Loving
The Words He Said
The Woman
Through the Tunnel
Lucy Grange
Pleasure
A Mild Attack of Locusts
The Witness
Flavours of Exile
Getting Off the Altitude
A Road to the Big City
Flight
The Day Stalin Died
Plants and Girls
Wine
He
The Eye of God in Paradise