ABSTRACT
Fiction requires plot and character, but also what Henry James called ‘material’: the social circumstances in which things happen and characters live. The bedsitting room, because of local customs and tenancy laws, was a specifically British type of cheap housing. It was a place of complex ‘in-betweenness’, both temporally and socially. Housing in London was hard to find, and Lessing began with a few months in a bedsit in 1950. The structures of everyday life in a bedsitter may differ from those in a nuclear family, but structure there is likely to be. In her autobiography, Under My Skin, Lessing asks herself: ‘Why is it I have lived my whole life with people who are automatically against authority?’. Lessing’s approach to documentary is that she proposes simply to tell us a story about her misadventures in looking for a home and about the people she meets along the way.
