Alfred & Emily is a book in two parts: one fictional, one memoir, both centred on the lives of Doris Lessing's parents. This is a simplification. Alfred & Emily is also a notebook that includes: an “explanation” of the relation between the real and imagined lives Lessing has given her parents; old photographs; an extract from The London Encyclopaedia on the Royal Free Hospital; and a striking quotation from Lady Chatterley's Lover.

In the first part of Alfred & Emily, Lessing imagines her parents' lives as they might have been if the First World War hadn't happened. Her father, Alfred Taylor, grew up playing with farmers' sons in fields around Colchester and always wanted a farm of his own; Lessing grants him “his heart's desire”. Her mother, Emily McVeagh, lost the great love of her life, a doctor who drowned in the Channel; Lessing lets her marry him.

Alfred and Emily are friends but never lovers. They share boundless energy and philanthropic interests in education and poverty relief. Emily works as a nurse at the Royal Free Hospital before her marriage, then becomes a socialite, is widowed early, and devotes herself to establishing charitable schools in her deceased husband's name. Despite the external signs of devotion, her marriage turns out to have been a deep disappointment.

Alfred emerges less clearly than Emily in Lessing's novella. He marries Betsy, a pretty, plump local girl, and they have two healthy sons, good sportsmen like their father. He is loyal to his best friend Bert, who becomes an alcoholic. He finds a substitute mother in kind-hearted Mary Lane, an older woman who also plays this role in Emily's life. Alfred and Mary set up a local school and Emily helps them by sending books from London. The edifying friendship between the three of them is the heart of the book.

In her explanatory notes, Lessing comments that in marrying her father to Betsy, “I enjoyed giving him someone warm and loving.” Emily, in fact as in fiction, was unwilling to consider remarriage after she was widowed. Lessing remembers discussing this with her brother even though “chat about the emotions was not really our habit”. They wondered “Why shouldn't she have something nice happen to her at last?” It is interesting that, even in her novella, Lessing has not over-ruled her mother's reluctance to remarry. Instead she hints that this was rooted in sexual inhibition, both generational and personal.

The history of the Royal Free Hospital, fascinating in its own right, provides a powerful frame for both real and fictional versions of Emily McVeagh's life. The hospital was established in 1828 by William Marsden, after he found a young woman dying on the steps of St Andrew's Church in Holborn but could not get her admitted to any of the London hospitals because they all demanded a letter of recommendation from a subscriber. The Royal Free was the first to introduce female medical students in 1877. Lessing has chosen not to turn the fictional Emily into a doctor: she remains a nurse as she was in life. It is the convergence between the fictional and real Emily that causes her to emerge so vividly from this book, still a force to be reckoned with by a Nobel prize- winning daughter in her eighties.

In contrast, the Alfred that Lessing remembers is very different from the quietly contented character of her novella. He lost his leg in the First World War, but his fellow soldiers in the trenches lost their lives, and he could never stop thinking and dreaming of them: “There was such a weight on my heart. My heart felt like a big cold stone...” After the war, he took his wife and young family to Southern Rhodesia in 1924. He died “a very old man” aged 62, and Lessing suggests that the cause of death should have been listed as the First World War.

The quotation from D.H. Lawrence that Lessing places at the centre of Alfred & Emily resonates with the themes of trauma and repression that run, like fault lines, through her parents' lives, but also reminds us of the immediate context of Lawrence's own novels, his own attempt to take the measure of the First World War: “Slowly, slowly, the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.”

It is now more than 40 years since Lessing published her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), in which Anna Wulf - a young novelist, divorcee, and single parent, fearing for her sanity - records her experiences in four notebooks of different colours: black for her problems as a writer, red for her political life, yellow for her emotional life, blue for everyday events. But it is the golden notebook, the one in which “things have come together”, that is most important.

Lessing has written carefully about the reception of The Golden Notebook and her original intentions for the novel, emphasising that it was not “a trumpet for Women's Liberation” but a book about breakdown and the idea “that sometimes when people ‘crack up' it is a way of self-healing”. Rupture, fragmentation and healing have remained important in her writing ever since. It is fascinating to see her focus so sharply in her new book on what must be, for us all, the most intimate of personal narratives: our parents' lives, what they were, or might have been.

Alfred & Emily by Doris Lessing
Fourth Estate, £16.99; 288pp Buy the book here

Extract

Thus. It is bright moonlight, we stand on the hill and down there the great mealie field is rippling in the moonrays, just green, not just green. It is possible to see there are people too because parts of the field are gently agitated. “Theives,” says my father, pleased because of the predictability of it all. “What's the sense,” he enquires of the night, the universe, “to go stripping cobs under a bright moon?”

“While the same dear old moon is looking down on us,” says my mother.

Or, my brother off at boarding school, and she is mourning because of his absence: “The same dear old moon...”

“Oh, come off it old girl,” says my father, bruised by the sentimentality she enjoys.

She had never understood why her higher flights embarrassed him. We, the children, were all appalled by them. But some kinds of sentimentality have in them an antidote. She was moved, her voice was rich with tears. She felt it, all right. But isn't sentimentality intolerable because it is false feeling? My mother was capable of weeping because of Oates going out into the snow - “I may be some time” - or the Last Post coming from the noisy radio that was so hard to keep steady on a wavelength. Yet when something terrible had to be done, like shooting an ill dog or drowning some kittens, she did it, lips tight, face hard. She complained that my father had a cold heart.

When she was ill, shortly after reaching the farm, she was intolerably unsentimental, and this leads me straight into the hardest part of what I am trying to understand.

Nothing that she ever told, or was said about her, or anyone could deduce of her in that amazing girlhood, so busy, so full of achievement, or of her nursing years, about which we had the best of witnesses, my father himself, or the years in Persia, so enjoyable and so social, nothing, anywhere, in all of this matches up with what my mother became.

Nothing fits, as if she were not one woman but several.

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