Where to Start with Doris Lessing: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Doris Lessing — whether to begin with The Golden Notebook, The Grass Is Singing, or Martha Quest. A complete reading guide to the Nobel laureate.
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) was the British novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 — awarded when she was eighty-eight years old, making her the oldest recipient in the prize’s history. Born in Persia to British parents and raised in Southern Rhodesia, she came to London in 1949 and over the following decades produced a body of work remarkable for its ambition, its political engagement, and its refusal to accept the categories that her era assigned to women, to writers, and to political dissidents. The Golden Notebook (1962) is her most important novel and one of the defining texts of second-wave feminism; her five-volume Children of Violence sequence is one of the great roman-fleuve in English; and her African novels engage with colonialism and racism with a directness that was rare in her time.
Where to Start: The Golden Notebook (1962)
The essential Lessing — and one of the most formally ambitious novels of the twentieth century. Anna Wulf, a writer in early 1950s London, keeps four notebooks that correspond to different aspects of her life and self: a black notebook recording her African past; a red notebook tracking her political commitments; a yellow notebook containing a fictional self-portrait; a blue notebook serving as a diary. Around this structure, Lessing places a conventional third-person novella called ‘Free Women’ that frames and, eventually, subverts the notebooks.
The novel is about the fragmentation of the modern self — the impossibility of integrating political commitment, creative work, sexual life, and personal identity into a coherent whole — and about the failure of the ideological systems (communism, psychoanalysis, the women’s movement in its early forms) to provide that integration. Lessing herself was ambivalent about the novel’s reception as a feminist text; it is more uncomfortable and more honest about women’s experience than most feminist novels. His most indispensable work.
The Grass Is Singing (1950)
Lessing’s first novel — and one of the most powerful debut novels in twentieth-century fiction. Mary Turner, the wife of a failing white farmer in Southern Rhodesia, is found murdered by her houseboy Moses at the beginning of the novel. The narrative works backward, tracing the circumstances that led to this ending: Mary’s life before the farm, her marriage, her increasing isolation and psychological deterioration, and the charged, impossible relationship that developed between her and Moses.
The novel is a diagnosis of the psychological costs of racism: the white farming community’s cruelty is not simply brutal, it is a system that warps the inner lives of those who uphold it. Mary’s deterioration is as much a product of colonial society as it is of personal pathology. The most accessible introduction to Lessing’s gifts and concerns.
Martha Quest (1952)
The first volume of Lessing’s Children of Violence sequence — and the beginning of one of the great autobiographical novels of the twentieth century. Martha Quest, growing up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia in the 1930s, is rebellious, intelligent, and desperate to escape the provincial colonial world that her parents inhabit. She reads voraciously, argues about politics, and lives in a state of intense, formless longing.
The novel establishes the pattern that runs through all five volumes: Martha’s perpetual dissatisfaction with whatever circumstances she finds herself in, her political commitments and their failures, and the tension between her desire for freedom and the social structures that constrain her. Lessing said that Martha Quest was essentially herself.
The Good Terrorist (1985)
Lessing’s most darkly comic novel — following Alice Mellings, a thirty-six-year-old woman who is the most domestically competent member of a group of radical leftists squatting in a condemned house in London. Alice scrubs the house, manages the group’s emotional crises, cajoles the local council into reconnecting the utilities, and cooks for everyone — while the group drifts, without conviction, toward actual terrorism.
The novel is a satirical examination of the British radical left of the 1980s and of a particular kind of well-meaning person who uses political commitment as a substitute for an examined life. Funnier than most Lessing and sharply observed.
Reading Doris Lessing
Lessing’s fiction is unified by an insistence on looking at the world without comforting distortions: at colonial Africa’s violence and complicity, at the failures of communism, at the contradictions of feminism, at the ways in which good intentions produce bad outcomes. Her prose is not elegant in the conventional sense — she was interested in truth rather than beauty — but her intelligence is exceptional and her moral seriousness is genuine. Begin with The Grass Is Singing for the most immediately accessible and the most concentrated; read The Golden Notebook for the fullest demonstration of her gifts; approach Martha Quest for the beginning of her great autobiographical sequence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Doris Lessing?
The Golden Notebook (1962) is Doris Lessing's most important novel and the best starting point for readers approaching her work seriously. Anna Wulf, a writer and committed communist in early 1950s London, keeps four notebooks — black (Africa and her first novel), red (her political life), yellow (a fictional alter ego), and blue (a personal diary) — and a fifth notebook in which she tries to bring them together. The novel is formally innovative, politically serious, and one of the most important feminist texts of the twentieth century. The Grass Is Singing is the best alternative for readers who want a shorter, more immediately accessible introduction to Lessing's gifts.
What is The Golden Notebook about?
The Golden Notebook (1962) follows Anna Wulf, a writer who has published one successful novel and is blocked on her second. She is divorced, raising a daughter, having an affair with a married man, and increasingly disillusioned with the Communist Party she has belonged to since her years in Africa. The novel is structured around five notebooks: a black notebook recording her African experiences; a red notebook tracking her political life; a yellow notebook containing a novel-within-a-novel (the story of a woman called Ella); a blue notebook serving as a diary; and a golden notebook in which she tries to integrate the fragmented aspects of herself. It is a novel about female experience, political idealism, creative block, and the difficulty of maintaining a unified self in a world that fragments experience into categories.
What is The Grass Is Singing about?
The Grass Is Singing (1950) is Lessing's first novel — set on a failing farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where Mary Turner, a white woman increasingly isolated on the farm, develops a complicated, explosive relationship with Moses, her Black African houseboy. The novel begins with Mary's murder and works backward, tracing the psychological deterioration that led to it. It is a novel about colonial Southern Africa, about the psychological costs of racism on those who uphold it, and about the isolation and powerlessness of women in colonial society. One of the most powerful first novels in twentieth-century fiction.
Do I need to read the Children of Violence series in order?
The Children of Violence series (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, and The Four-Gated City) follows Martha Quest from adolescence in Southern Rhodesia through her two marriages, her communist political involvement, and her eventual immigration to England. Martha Quest (1952) is the first volume and the best place to start the series. The series is semi-autobiographical — Lessing drew extensively on her own experiences in Rhodesia and London — and works best read in order. However, readers who want to experience Lessing's major work can begin with The Golden Notebook, which stands entirely alone.
