Doris Lessing controversially disavowed the label of “feminist” despite her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, earning accolades as a groundbreaking feminist classic. The Fifth Child also explores feminist themes of female autonomy, the horrors of motherhood, and Exposing the Myth of the Ideal Family; however, Lessing likewise took issue with some of the ways the novella was interpreted.

In a 2007 interview, Lessing explained that the novella was inspired by folklore about fairies and changelings, where an offspring of fantastical creatures like goblins and gnomes is raised by humans, with neither the child nor the human parents knowing of its magical origins. The novella was also inspired by a letter that Lessing had read in a newspaper from a mother of four children who confessed that her fifth child was a “devil” who rejected affection, ruined their domestic bliss, and made her siblings suffer. The letter pushed Lessing to write The Fifth Child as a horror story about a non-human child (“Doris Lessing.” Web of Stories), and the idea of a literally monstrous offspring echoes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967).

Lessing was surprised when many readers wrote her to describe their personal experiences of raising a child with autism spectrum disorder and their identification with Harriet. Lessing contended that Ben was not written as a child with a disability; she instead stated that “he’s impossible” and that the plot was founded on a “totally impossible premise” (“Doris Lessing’s Unfinished Business With ‘Ben in the World.’” YouTube, uploaded by PBS NewsHour, 18 Nov. 2013). However, Lessing adjusted her responses away from her authorial intent to delve into the ways that Ben is treated for his difference. She did not interpret Ben’s actions as evil but a matter of being “just in the wrong place” (“Doris Lessing.” Web of Stories). Lessing saw Ben’s destructive actions in the Lovatts’ home as something out of his control, and her empathetic portrayal of both mother and child confronts the difficulties of coping, for better or worse, with what society refuses to acknowledge. Lessing was also surprised to learn that adolescents identified with Ben. She discovered from her young readers that they understood what it was like to be a misfit, feel uncomfortable, and be made to feel as if they didn’t belong.

Despite Lessing’s authorial intent to write a horror story about an evolutionarily regressive creature to explore the boundaries of humanity, various critics have also interpreted the work as an allegory for racial otherness, Thatcherism, eugenics, and womanhood itself. In a 1988 interview, Lessing rejected interpretations that the novella was a moral fable or a direct allegory about Palestine or European migrants, as some critics have argued. She disputed “reducing [the novella] to a simple formula” and insisted that “there’s no solution to the problem of this book” (Rothstein, Mervyn. “The Painful Nurturing of Doris Lessing’s ‘Fifth Child.’” The New York Times, 14 June 1988). In a similarly contradictory manner as her disavowal of feminism, Lessing described the novella as being influenced by socio-political events but not about the events themselves: Her trip to visit refugees from the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, and her rage, frustration, and shame at the censored news coverage of their suffering, infused the feeling of the book and her representation of Ben; meanwhile, the plot of a domestic bliss being destroyed related to Lessing’s own upbringing during the two World Wars that devastated families and children. Though her points are similar to academic interpretations of the novella that invoke history and politics, for Lessing, the difference was a matter of distinguishing the novella’s mood from its meaning.