The Golden Hoax Book

By Richard Zoglin

A celebrated author creates her strangest fiction

The trouble with Jane Somers' first novel, The Diary of a Good Neighbor, was not that it was poorly reviewed but that it was scarcely reviewed at all. The few critics who noticed the book liked it, but Somers, identified on the book jacket as the pseudonym of a "well-known English woman journalist," drew modest attention in Britain and the U.S. A sequel, If the Old Could . . ., published early this year, would probably have found its way to a remainder bin if the real author had not revealed herself last week. The literary world on both sides of the Atlantic was astonished to find that the celebrated British novelist Doris Lessing was behind the elaborate hoax.

Lessing, 64, author of such works as The Golden Notebook and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, is one of the most serious and protean writers in the world. Why did she stop at the height of her career to play the prankster? Her intent, as she explains in the preface to an upcoming one-volume paperback edition of the Somers novels, was partly to show how difficult it is for the work of unknown authors to attract wide attention. On a more personal level, she wanted to twit the critics who have insisted on pigeonholing her: first as a feminist writer, later as a purveyor of visionary science fiction. "I wanted to be reviewed on merit, as a new writer, without the benefit of a 'name,' " she asserts, "to get free of that cage of associations and labels that every established writer has to learn to live inside."

The contemporary setting and realistic style of The Diary of a Good Neighbor--the memoir of a successful middle-aged magazine editor who befriends a lonely old woman--seem to have fooled nearly everyone. The manuscript was first sent incognito to two of Lessing's British publishers. Both rejected it without recognizing Lessing's touch. A third, remarking that the style bore a resemblance to Lessing's, agreed to publish the novel in Britain and was let in on the secret. But only Robert Gottlieb, editor in chief of Knopf and a close friend of Lessing's, recognized the real author at first glance when he was shown the manuscript by her agent in 1982. "As soon as I read it, I burst into laughter," he says, "because it was a voice that is so well known to me."

Gottlieb kept the secret from his colleagues, and Knopf treated the two novels no differently from those of any other new writer. With no author or sensational subject matter to promote, the result was "exactly what you'd expect," says Gottlieb: a handful of reviews and modest sales of just under 3,000 copies each. Hard-cover editions of Lessing novels usually sell between 15,000 and 30,000 in the U.S.

Lessing decided to end the ruse after word of Somers' true identity began to leak out. But she is amazed that none of the books' readers or reviewers were able to identify her prose. "We thought we couldn't possibly get away with it," she told TIME. "The single most astonishing fact is that nobody guessed it was me." The mild ripple created by her books was less surprising. "A very good first novel can get published and get good reviews and then vanish," she said. "Few publishers have the attitude they used to have: keep the writers in print."

True to form, Lessing is staying one step ahead of her critics. She has finished a new novel, her 19th, to be published next year. It concerns a young Englishwoman who drifts into terrorist activity, an apparent return to the political subject matter of Lessing's earlier work. Despite "a few very nice fan letters," she has no plans to resurrect Jane Somers in print, though fans and critics will undoubtedly race to read the pseudonymous works and fit them into Lessing's oeuvre. The irony of that does not escape the author. Were it not for her unmasking, Lessing points out, "poor old Jane Somers could have faded away forever."

--By Richard Zoglin