au revoir, my dear Lessing

Five books later, I think I must give Doris Lessing a break. Forgive a final out-pouring of crush, please.

"Why should I stay in this country? I'll tell you something, I've just understood it – when you've left one country, then you've left all countries, forever."
          – Landlocked

"[she] found that [he] had, in the intervening years, become possessed, had succumbed (to what? She didn't know – unless one chose to use shorthand words like evil, to be done with thinking about it)"
          – The Four-Gated City

"She had become that person which she hated and feared more than any other – the matron*."
          – The Four-Gated City

She does favor the em dash. But I favor her.

*An insult I can recall stretching back a long time "You sound like my mother" or even simply "Okay, Mom." Female authority as disparaged, unserious, and sexless. So much of The Four-Gated City (the fifth book) explores how we were (or are) socialized to hate our mothers – for their self-abnegation, their sacrifice, their compassion. And then you have moments such as this:

"It can be taken as an axiom that all governments everywhere lie – it is inevitable. Naive people think that conspiracies are seven men around a table in a Machiavellian plot: a conspiracy is an atmosphere, or frame of mind in which people are impelled to do things, perhaps those things that they could never do as individuals, or couldn't do at other times when the atmosphere is different."

It boggles the mind that she isn't more widely read.