ABSTRACT
Doris Lessing had arrived in London ‘in 1949, when England was at its dingiest, my personal fortunes at their lowest, and my morale at zero. I also had a small child, (IPE, p. 14). However, The Grass is Singing quickly found a publisher. She had become a writer, and, for almost ten years, she wrote herself out of Africa, while gradually and rather reluctantly acclimatizing herself in England. It was – she told C. J. Driver 14 – her family’s doubtful Englishness rather than any international communist contacts that enabled her to adapt; she did not join the British Communist Party until 1952, and left it in 1956. The change in material circumstance and culture was troubled, and a general air of dubiety and unease hangs over the English writings from these years. Nearly all are uncharacteristically glum and hesitant: the novella ‘The Other Woman’, collected in 1953 with four African novellas to make Five; the unsuccessful ‘exile’ romance Retreat to Innocence (1956); the stories collected in The Habit of Loving in 1957, the year also of her essay on the state of the novel, ‘The Small Personal Voice’, which is rather more deliberately hopeful and international in tone; a play and some poems; and, effectively summing up this whole period, her documentary book In Pursuit of the English (1960).
