ABSTRACT
That was Doris Lessing, at the outset of a quest she chronicles in a ‘documentary’ book, In Pursuit of the English. Her perspective locates Englishness in her father, in media (newspapers), and not so much in England the place as in England the ‘moral sense’, so that Englishness resides not in a country (fatherland), but in a style of criticism, literally patriarchal, which may be more legible on the other side of the planet-in her case post-war Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)—than in its original home.
