Doris May Lessing, The Sweetest Dream

Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error

Spanning more than thirty years,

The Sweetest Dream

(2001) opens

in medias res

on a slice of life in the late 1960s. The unconventional Lennox household is run by divorced Frances who brings up her two sons Andrew and Colin in her German mother-in-law’s large house in Hampstead. Although the communist father Jolyon Lennox, renamed comrade Johnny, is thoroughly disapproved of by his own mother Julia, he regularly comes to the house to share the dinners Frances cooks for her sons and their friends, “the waifs and strays” (SW 142, 221) sheltering at the Lennoxes. As they are nonconformist teenagers who rebel against their parents’ conservative upbringing, these children are put in the hands of Johnny who is set on gaining them to the communist cause (147). One of the “disturbed”…

1987 words

Citation: Brevet, Anne-Laure. "The Sweetest Dream". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 September 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10755, accessed 28 March 2024.]

10755 The Sweetest Dream 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.