ABSTRACT
Doris Lessing was born in 1919. Her family lived in what was then Southern Rhodesia and she left that country in 1949. She has written of it in one of her best novels The Grass is Singing, 1950, and, in a series of novels whose heroine is Martha Quest, has explored the sexual and polititical growing up of Martha against a background of Rhodesian society. (Martha Quest. 1952; A Proper Marriage, 1954, A Ripple from the Storm, 1958 and Landlocked, 1965). The Golden Notebook, 1962, tells a good deal about the plight of the ‘emancipated’ woman intellectual. She has written poems, many short stories and a play as well as novels but her main interests seem to be in social and political questions. Her best novels and stories, however, are straightforward and detailed evocations of people and places.
