ABSTRACT

Allow me to introduce you to Martha Quest, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s novel The Four-Gated City (1969). Martha is a Marxist intellectual recently arrived in 1950s London from Rhodesia. She sees London as socially deprived and ugly. For Iris, however, a local woman with whom Martha is staying, the neighborhood is a living archive, textured and animated by layers of history and memory (Donald 1999).