Affectivity and Intimacy in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and Rosa Montero's LaCarne

Abstract

This article discusses the literary similarities between Doris Lessing's Love, Again (1995) and Rosa Montero's La carne (2016), emphasising the parallels between these writers’ interest in women’s ageing experiences and the role that the main characters in both of these novels play in the contemporary cultural scene. Of particular interest for this analysis is the experience of these two female authors, whose novels were written in historical periods that are marked by major social and economic upheavals, between the 1990s and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I suggest that their respective productions problematise the notions of affectivity and intimacy and, notably, showcase the contributions made by women, as creative agents of social and cultural change, in the understanding of the process of ageing in contemporary Europe.