Analysis of the Story "Habit of Loving" by Doris Lessing

The story Habit of Loving is written by a woman writer – Doris Lessing. Literary critics before Marxist and feminist theorists did not pay much attention to the real author’s or reader’s personality, nor the historical background being behind the text and governing the possibility for the emerging of one or another kind of literary work. Marxists and feminists, on their turn, “would also ask specific kinds of question about the immediate context of composition.” (Selden, 1989: 136)
Marxist and feminist literary theories both “adopt ‘conflict’ model of the society” (ibid., 135), but the conflicts reflected by literary works are seen in the light of class conflicts in the first case and the conflicts with the patriarchy in the second case: “Feminists perceive women as in the position of a social class, exploited by patriarchy at all levels” (ibid.).…