There was a long gap before Lessing's next novel, as she was writing about visits to Africa, and the first volume of her autobiography. But in 1996 Love, Again was published, an intricately patterned tale of many strands. At its heart is the life of Julie Vairon, a girl from Martinique in the late Victorian and Edwardian era; she flees to Paris with a young aristocratic lover, who is forced by his family to abandon her. Some years later she falls deeply in love with another aristocrat, Rémy, who is also forced to part from her, and finally, although offered marriage by a sober, upright man, she drowns herself. Throughout her life, Julie writes poems, paints, and composes extraordinarily haunting music; the music of her first phase recalls that of the troubadours, the trouvéres, and her final phase produces something very different, a ‘cool crystalline’ music (LA 26): this last phase, with its ‘shimmering uncomfortable patterns of sound, continually repeating, but not exactly’ (LA 69) suggests the minimalism of Philip Glass, so her talent (intuitively it would seem) links the medieval with the modern. Then in her painting, Julie produces many self-portraits, trying, it would seem, to find ‘her real, her hidden nature’ (LA 17); and she writes an enigmatic journal. Some feminists view her, the narrator tells us, as the ‘archetypal female victim’, others praise her independence of spirit (LA 25–6).

This is not a novel to be read at speed; it is full of hints and implications to guide the reader through the intricate patterning. So we find Sarah, the ageing protagonist, writing a play about Julie's life for the theatre company of which she was a founder member; Sarah lives in a messy flat, full of memories, a place she means to clear, but has been too busy to undertake as yet: here again is a living space that reflects a state of mind. Sarah is deeply disturbed by Julie's troubadour music, the love music of the past, as she herself faces the crisis of her own ageing: a book she is reading reminds her about ‘growing old gracefully’, achieving a stoicism that hides from the young the fact that ‘the flesh withers around an unchanged core’ (LA 3).