Contemporary British Novel

Tomislav Pavlović

Lecture 5 – From Engaged Literature to Science Fiction via Feminism:

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Persia (now Iran) of British parents, and grew up in
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her parents moved in 1925. Educated at a Roman Catholic
convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare), Lessing left school aged 14, and thereafter
was self-educated. She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, and it was around this time
that she started reading material on politics and sociology that her employer gave her to read.
She began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone
operator, and she soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two
children, before the marriage ended in 1943. Following her divorce, Lessing was drawn to the
Left Book Club, a communist book club, and it was here that she met her second husband,
Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group and had a child together,
before that marriage also ended in divorce in 1949. Because of her campaigning against nuclear
arms and South African apartheid, Lessing was banned from that country and from Rhodesia for
many years. She moved to London with her youngest son in 1949 and it was at this time that her
first novel The Grass Is Singing (1950) was published.
The novel takes place in Rhodesia during the late 1940’s and deals with the racial politics
between whites and blacks in that country. Apart from being a bleak analysis of the protagonist’s
failed marriage, The Grass Is Singing also deals with the fear of black power and energy that
Lessing saw as underlying the white colonial experience of Africa. In this way, the tragic decline
of Mary and Dick Turner’s marriage and fortunes becomes a metaphor for the whole white
presence in Africa.
The Grass Is Singing is representative of what is usually referred to as the first phase of
Lessing’s writing career, from the mid-1940’s to the mid-1950’s, characterised by her radical
treatment of social issues (to which she would return in The Good Terrorist, published in 1985).
Her colonial experience, left-wing politics and feminist sentiments 1 would form part of a five-
volume sequence entitled “The Children of Violence”, published between 1952 and 1969. Its
plot covered the period from the 1930’s to the end of the 20th century. The lead character,
Martha Quest, after whom the first novel in the sequence was named, comes to Britain having
grown up in “Zambesia” and been a member of a Marxist cell in South Africa. Over the course
of its seventeen years of publication, the sequence would change dramatically from a story of
Martha’s life to an apocalyptic look at where society is heading. 2 The central theme of these
novels is Martha’s self-discovery, focusing on the role of the individual in the formation of a
good community. The final volume, The Four-Gated City (1969), deals with Martha’s life in
post-World War Two Britain. She is an integral part of the social history of the time – the Cold
War, the Aldermaston Marches (against nuclear armaments), the Swinging London, the
deepening of poverty and social anarchy. The volume ends with the century in the grip of World
1
Cf. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel 1878-2001, Penguin, London, 2001, p. 334.
2
Cf. Elizabeth Maslen, Doris Lessing, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1994, p. 7.
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War Three. In the year 1997, Martha dies on a contaminated island off the northwest coast of
Scotland. Most of the people of Britain have died before her of multiple afflictions: bubonic
plague, nerve gases, nuclear explosions.
While writing the Martha Quest books, Lessing discarded Marxism, 3 having come to the
realisation that it ignored spiritual matters,4 and focused on psychological awareness, which
became the dominant motif of her fiction from the mid-1950’s to the end of the 1960’s.
It was during this period that she produced the book that most scholars consider to be her
best work – The Golden Notebook (1962). It was something very different from the
predominantly left-wing engaged literature she had been producing until then: The Golden
Notebook is a multi-layered narrative about “free women” which asks questions about the nature
of storytelling.5 Lessing tried to explain its complex structure in a very interesting preface she
added to the novel nine years after its original publication. 6 The novel contains five “notebooks”,
framed by the narrative of “Free Women”, which is by and about their author, Anna Wulf. The
Black Notebook deals with her life in Africa, The Red Notebook with her political life, growing
disillusionment with and leaving of the Communist Party. The Yellow Notebook is an attempt at
fictionalising her life under the name of “Ella”, while The Blue Notebook deals with the central
theme of her breakdown and psychoanalysis. The final, Golden Notebook, represents an attempt
to tie the strands of Anna’s life together. Being a story about the making of a story, The Golden
Notebook is certainly a post-modernist work of “metafiction”, reflective of a shift in the British
novel evident in the 1960’s, but it is also, as Malcolm Bradbury rightly points out, one of the
most powerful post-war British novels, the most remarkable work by a woman to appear in
Britain since Virginia Woolf.7 Another pertinent observation by Bradbury is that Lessing was
understandably worried by the limitations of a feminist reading: the book is not merely about a
crisis of discourse, subjectivity and female identity – it is also an attempt to explore the moral,
intellectual and emotional crisis of what Lessing saw as a fragmenting and apocalyptic age.8
The publication of The Golden Notebook marked a turning point for the “Children of
Violence” series, which changed radically in form, attitude and subject from this point. 9 Lessing
followed this sequence with a series of novels dealing in almost visionary fashion with social
crisis, mental breakdown and personal quest. The most interesting of these is Memoirs of a
Survivor (1974). The story takes place in the near future when society has broken down due to an
unspecified disaster. The Memoirs of a Survivor is set in the near future at “a time of savagery
and anarchy”,10 although it is never made clear what kind of global crisis brought about such
anarchic conditions. The Memoirs of a Survivor is narrated throughout in the first person. The
female narrator, the survivor of the title, is unidentified at the beginning of the novel. Her
background is not sketched in and she is never named, but her character gradually emerges
through her discourse. The narrator is casually “given” a teenage girl called Emily to look after.
She does not know or ask about the teenager’s earlier experiences, although she suspects that, as
a child, Emily was intimidated in some way. Emily brings with her a large family pet called
Hugo, species unknown. Hugo is referred to as a cat-dog and appears to possess the capacity for

3
Bradbury, op. cit., p. 334.
4
Cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing.
5
Bradbury, op. cit., p. 378.
6
Cf. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, Harper Perennial, London, 2007, pp. 7-21.
7
Bradbury, op. cit., p. 381.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor, Flamingo, London, 1995, p. 52.
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deep thought. His arrival signals a shift in the novel from conventional dystopian fiction to a
more fantastic plane.
Lessing has, somewhat bewilderingly, referred to this novel as a kind of autobiography. 11
What is confusing about this remark of Lessing’s is that the novel is not written in a realistic
mode. As Elizabeth Maslen points out, the book reinvents autobiography by interleaving an
apocalyptic representation of the outer world with glimpses of the protagonist’s inner life. 12 The
action takes place in the protagonist’s flat, from which she observes the apocalyptic world
outside. The “children of violence” who supplied the title for the Martha Quest sequence now
literally walk the streets: gangs of dislocated children move together, plundering and scavenging
amidst the wreckage of a disintegrating city.
However, the protagonist does not only watch: as she discovers to her surprise, she is
able to dissolve one wall of her room. In the space beyond the wall, she begins to be subjected, to
a child’s-eye view of an oppressive nursery where “personal” scenes from Emily’s childhood are
played out. In an interview, Lessing herself said that “what the narrator believes that she is
seeing behind the wall, that apparent dream world, actually represents her own life, her own
childhood. In the tangible world, Emily whom she sees growing up represents the image of her
adolescence. Thus, reality and dream, marked off by the wall, complement each other to give an
all-encompassing vision to the narrator’s past.”13 The “dreams” in Memoirs are apparently her
own life, part of the “attempt at autobiography”; so the small girl who experiences the “prison”
of the “personal” scenes is both the narrator and Emily, this oppressive childhood being meant
somehow to represent a universal experience. 14 As Gillian Dooley has pointed out, with the
insight Lessing has now provided into her early childhood with Volume One of her (more literal)
autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), it is obvious that Emily’s childhood beyond the wall is
indeed a vivid recreation of her own early years in Persia; and the adolescent Emily in the “real”
world of the novel is recognizable as the clever, polite, uncommunicative teenager who grew up
to become Doris Lessing. But without this external information it does not seem unreasonable to
expect the reader to focus on the autobiography in a work which has so many other elements –
fantasy, dreams, prophecy, social comment, psychological study, fable.15
In the final pages of the novel, when the existing society in Memoirs collapses, the
narrator’s motley “family”, feral children and a metamorphosed Hugo break through into a
transcendent world where the task of beginning a new civilization lies before them. Teasingly,
nothing whatsoever is explained, including Emily’s pet Hugo, so that the reader is ultimately left
to draw his or her own conclusions concerning this experiment at reconciling a language of
violent social change with one of striving towards self-knowledge.
From predominantly psychological concerns, Lessing turned to philosophical ones,
influenced by the philosophy of Sufism, which found their most memorable expression in her
science fictional series of novels entitled “Canopus in Argos”, published towards the end of the
1970’s and in the early 1980’s. These works fall into the category of social or soft science fiction
due to their focus on characterization and social-cultural issues, and their de-emphasis of the
details of scientific technology. Although Lessing’s switch to science fiction was not popular
with some critics, when asked about which of her books she considered most important, Lessing
11
Maslen, op. cit., p. 30.
12
Ibid.
13
Quoted in Gillian Dooley, “An Autobiography of Everyone? Intentions and Definitions in Doris Lessing’s
Memoirs of a Survivor”, available at https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2328/1495/1/G_Dooley.pdf.
14
Cf. Dooley, op. cit.
15
Ibid.
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chose her “Canopus in Argos” science fiction series. Curiously enough, although her novel The
Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by many scholars, it is not the case with the
author herself, who has written that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and
freeing one’s self from illusions had been overlooked by critics, and that she resents being
pigeon-holed as a feminist author.
In the 1980’s, she attempted to publish two novels under a pseudonym, that of Jane
Somers, to demonstrate the difficulty new authors faced in trying to break into print. The novels
(The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983, and If the Old Could…, 1984, subsequently published in
a single volume under the title The Diaries of Jane Somers) were declined by Lessing’s UK
publisher, but accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred
A. Knopf. Another notable work from the 1980’s, The Good Terrorist, examined with irony a
militant left-wing life style and the short distance between idealism and terrorism. In an
interview, Lessing spoke of some real-life sources for her novel. “The immediate thing was the
Harrods bombing [in December 1983]. Here the media reported it to sound as if it was the work
of amateurs. I started to think, what kind of amateurs could they be? I got completely fascinated
by this line of thought. Also, I happened to be in Ireland when they bumped off Mountbatten. I
was just across the water from where it happened, and all the little boys, aged about 10 to 15,
were rushing about, delighted, because of course they admire the I.R.A. I thought how easy it
would be for a kid, not really knowing what he or she was doing, to drift into a terrorist group.”
The novel deals with group of “comrades” calling themselves the “Communist Centre
Union”, a left-wing group committed to revolutionary action, who live in squalor in a house
scheduled for demolition. At first, suspense centres on the house: will the protagonist, a woman
in her late thirties called Alice Mellings, be able to rid it of gallons of raw sewage, to hack
cement out of the toilet, to repel the police, to clear the rubbish and restore water and electricity,
and prevent major fallouts between antagonistic members of the household, before the council
meeting that must decide its fate? And as this race against time accelerates, other questions are
set ticking; why is Alice so obsessed with creating a home? Why does she dote on the odious
Jasper, whom she professes to love despite his homosexual inclinations? How will the IRA react
to Bert and Jasper’s naive offer of assistance? Will the apolitical Jim, who was the first to move
into the derelict house and welcomed all newcomers, get thrown out? Who are the mysterious
comrades in the house next door, and are they really burying explosives in the garden?
Once the house is temporarily saved, the question of how and where the group can make
their mark becomes the racing engine of the plot, and the novel moves into darker territory. The
“professionals” (who may be KGB, or IRA, or Special Branch) are closing in. Alice becomes a
thief; the unbalanced Faye attempts suicide; Philip, who fixes up the squat to livable condition, is
killed; parcels of gun parts are delivered in the middle of the night. Things move on inexorably
to the detonation of the bomb, with its random destruction of innocent lives.
Alice sees herself as a committed revolutionary. She knows how to confront officials,
spray paint slogans, but she really does not have an understanding of political movements. The
key to Alice’s character is her perverted relationship with her mother. Alice’s need to go to any
lengths to see her comrades eating happily together around the big kitchen table is motherly. Her
protectiveness of deadly Jasper is motherly, and she even acknowledges that while she is with
him she can never have a child. When she hugs him, it is as though she held something cold and
wailing, a lost child. When Jim is about to start his new job, Alice thought she was rather like a
mother, making sure a child had eaten before going off to school. In the final confrontation
between Alice and her mother, Dorothy, Dorothy’s cruellest retort is to reveal the similarity

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between them: “I thought... I won’t have Alice stuck in my position, no qualifications for
anything. But it turned out you spend your life exactly as I did. Cooking and nannying for other
people. An all-purpose female drudge.”16
Motherhood here is terrible: for poor Dorothy, giving and giving to her crazily selfish
daughter, until she is reduced to bleak poverty. For Alice, giving and giving (financially and
emotionally) to cruel Jasper, who occasionally rewards her with a crumb of love – permission to
put her sleeping bag along the same wall as his. The theme is echoed in the lesbian relationship
between Roberta, a comforting mother figure, and Faye, the pretty, naughty child who harms
Roberta in the most effective way she can by blowing herself up. Motherhood is presented as an
obsessive need to love and protect those who seem weaker and less adequate than yourself, and
yet who reject and hurt you. Alice’s motherliness is even applied to the act of terror itself; after
the bomb has exploded she pities those who don’t understand the necessity for the outrage.
“...Alice sat with tears in her eyes, thinking, Poor things, poor things, they simply don’t
understand! – as if she had her arms around all the poor silly ordinary people in the world.” 17
Motherhood has become a perversion.
Lessing’s terrorists are contaminated by the muddle of being human: they have parents
they rebel against, they have suffered injustices, they have maternal impulses and physical needs,
and a burning need for identity and recognition. This is not to suggest that Lessing demands
sympathy for her characters; this is not a book whose aim is to help us understand the poor things
who are driven to such extremes. It is a witty and furious book, angry at human stupidity and
destructiveness, both within the system and without. It shows us people who commit an evil act
and it shows how that evil springs out of our own society.
All members of the group are wrong-headed, but Alice is particularly and peculiarly so
because of her inconsistencies. She genuinely cares about individuals, has a genuine sense of the
importance of the group, and yet she can be cruel and divisive. In theory, she is a socialist, but
she has never read Marx or Lenin, she merely treats their names like holy images. When she tries
to express her socialism, she resorts to jargon and stock platitudes. Ironically, her mother was an
intellectual socialist of working-class origin who appeared to brush the growing Alice aside for
the sake of her “cause”. However, by the time we meet her, she seems to have lost faith in the
cause and the movement.
All the central characters are shown as wreckers of causes: like children, they abandon
them if they suffer a set-back. Lessing insistently shows this childishness as the product of
society, sometimes explicitly taking the system to task for these irresponsible, stunted children it
has helped to create. The central characters are both victims of the society which has damaged
them, leaving them as alienated individuals with no clear idea of how to operate collectively, and
wreckers of the causes they espouse, since each of them seeks to satisfy his or her own needs
rather than to serve a cause.
In the background, there are professional terrorists, who are presented as being as
faceless as the local government and Welfare State. They do not spell out their aims: we cannot
even tell who is representing what cause. They make no more attempt to guide these confused
anarchists than the capitalist society, which is supposedly their common enemy.
The Fifth Child (1988) was a mixture of genres from mythology to Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. In the story a family is torn apart by the arrival of their fifth offspring, a monster.
Its sequel, Ben, in the World (2000) further develops Ben’s life after he has left his family.

16
Cf. Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist, Paladin, London, 1990, p. 353.
17
Idem, pp. 392-393.
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 On October 11th 2007, Lessing was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature. She was 87, which made her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the
award and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category. She also stands as only the eleventh
woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year
history.