Martha Quest

Martha in Rhodesia

Martha Quest is fifteen, living on a farm in Southern Rhodesia in the late 1930s, and she is furious. She is furious at her mother, who is disappointed and controlling. She is furious at her father, whose World War I damage has curdled into passivity. She is furious at the white settler society around her — the sundowner parties, the small ambitions, the way the world seems organized to keep a girl of her intelligence and energy from going anywhere. She reads voraciously: the books she can get hold of, the politics of the Left that are beginning to reach the colony in pamphlets and newspapers, anything that suggests there is a world beyond this farm and these people.

The farm is rendered with the precision of Lessing’s own childhood — she grew up in Southern Rhodesia on a farm much like this one, the child of British settlers who had believed the colony would be more rewarding than it was. The landscape has a quality she renders without sentimentality: beautiful and alien to the people who claim to own it, the African sky and the veld and the Native families on the property’s margins present but never, in the white world Martha inhabits, acknowledged as the actual owners of the story.

Martha’s first jobs in the city — she escapes the farm for Salisbury, gets work as a legal secretary — and her first romances trace the limited options available to a woman of her class and intelligence in this world. She is too clever for what is on offer. The people she is expected to socialize with bore her. The men she meets want her in specific, predictable ways. The Communist Party cell she begins attending seems to offer something different, and the novel ends with Martha on the verge of a marriage she knows is probably a mistake, unable to stop herself because it is the only form of escape currently visible.

The Children of Violence Sequence

The five novels — Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), The Four-Gated City (1969) — trace Martha from adolescence in Rhodesia through her adult life in London to a near-future catastrophic conclusion. The sequence was written over seventeen years, and the later volumes are different in significant ways from the early ones: by The Four-Gated City, Lessing is deep into questions of inner space and collective consciousness that were not visible in 1952.

The title refers to Lessing’s generation — the children born in the aftermath of World War I, growing up under the shadow of the coming World War II, formed by violence they did not choose and could not escape. Martha carries this formation throughout the sequence, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. The violence is not only the literal violence of war; it is the structural violence of colonial society, the violence done to women by a world that has no place for their ambitions, the psychological violence of families that cannot see their children clearly.

Lessing’s semi-autobiographical investment is pronounced throughout. Martha’s Rhodesian childhood is Lessing’s. The Communist Party involvement in Salisbury is Lessing’s. The departure for London is Lessing’s. But Martha is not simply Lessing: she is a character who makes choices Lessing did not make and inhabits a life Lessing constructed from but also against her own. The sequence is the kind of project that only a novelist willing to spend decades inside a single consciousness could attempt.

Reading Lessing’s Major Project

Martha Quest was published in 1952, eleven years before The Golden Notebook (1962), which is the novel that made Lessing’s international reputation and which is often the entry point for new readers. Reading Martha Quest after The Golden Notebook — which many readers do — means arriving already knowing what Lessing can do at her most ambitious. Reading it before means following the sequence as it was written, which has its own logic: you watch Lessing’s technique and ambition expand across the five volumes, and the radicalism of The Four-Gated City’s ending lands harder for having followed Martha from that farm in the 1930s.

The Grass Is Singing (1950), Lessing’s first novel, is in some ways a better standalone introduction to the colonial Rhodesia she knew — shorter, more concentrated, brutal about the racial dynamics the Children of Violence sequence circles around. But Martha Quest is the right entry if you intend to read the sequence, which repays the commitment.

Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, at age eighty-eight — the oldest person to receive it at the time. The Nobel committee described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.” Martha Quest, on her farm in Rhodesia, furious and reading and looking for a way out, is where that scrutiny begins.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The essential opening volume of Lessing’s most autobiographical sequence: a vivid, angry portrait of colonial Rhodesia and a young woman who will spend five novels and seventeen years finding out what life can actually hold for someone like her.