![]() Her acute eye and gift for social analysis lend The Grass is Singing its matter of fact style and its psychological acumen. Lessing is well known for channeling her personal experiences into her writing. It’s all the more powerful because of Lessing’s intimate focus on the psychological toll taken on the three main characters: Mary Turner, Dick Turner, and Moses, their African houseboy (a title that is difficult to type, but that says much about the racial hierarchy in Southern Rhodesia at the time). Her first novel is unwavering in its portrayal of the damaging racial, class, and gender-based power dynamics in Southern Rhodesia in the early 20th century. She reveals how they are formed, what holds them together, and the profound toll they take on all who live according to their rules. Instead, she focuses on the intertwined hierarchies in Southern Rhodesia - race, gender, class - and uses her novelist’s lens to dissect these hierarchies. It is thought he was in search of valuables.įor Lessing, the crime itself isn’t of interest - it seems in some ways a foregone conclusion. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning. In her first novel, The Grass is Singing (first published 1950), Doris Lessing begins with a short description of a crime on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe): The Grass Is Singing is her first published novel. Lessing has been writing short stories and poems, many of them published in South African magazines, since she was seventeen. Published there earlier this year, The Grass Is Singing was the March Daily GraphicBook Find of the Month. Her novel was accepted immediately by Michael Joseph of London. Lessing, armed with £20 and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing, arrived in England in the spring of 1949. Following her education at the Dominican Convent in Salisbury, she held a variety of jobs - nursemaid, telephone operator, chauffeur, and stenographer. But above all, it is the story of Mary Turner who was a victim of conflicting forces within herself set up by a few casual, overheard words.Īlthough born in Persia, Doris Lessing spent most of her childhood on her father's 3000-acre maize farm in Southern Rhodesia. At times, too, it is angry at the festering question of black against white which broods over the land like thunder. At times as violent and harsh as the brown earth and arching blue sky of the veldt, The Grass Is Singing is mercilessly penetrating and casts a spell all its won. And then finally one heat-laden afternoon, without even realizing what she had done, Mary Turner lit the fuse that led to a shattering explosion of violence and tragedy.ĭoris Lessing's novel is a remarkable piece of work. Little by little the years worked their slow poison. After one attempt to return to her life in town, she stayed on the farm, listening to the strident din of the cicadas and fighting against the realization that the security and happiness which she and Dick needed so desperately might never come. She hated the stuffy little house she hated the natives she hated Dick at times and most of all she hated the burning heat and the loneliness. When Dick took her to his farm in the veldt, Mary stepped into a life completely different from anything she had ever imagined. ![]() ![]() He was a farmer - a hard-working sensitive man with an intense love of his land, a stubborn pride - but with a fatal weakness. Unconsciously she began to look for a man to marry, and she found one. ![]() At those words, her delicately balanced little world overturned, and she suddenly realized that it was desirable to have a husband, to be like the rest of her circle. This is the high-tension story of a woman whose life was changed by a few careless words.Įven though Mary Turner had led a somewhat limited life in her sleepy South African town, she was happy until she overheard some friends say that she would never marry. ![]()
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