In 1952, Lessing published Martha Quest, the first of five novels that would form her Children of Violence sequence. The other titles, published over the next seventeen years, are A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The first four books are set in an African colony called Zambesia (a composite, Lessing says, of “various white-dominated parts of Africa”) and the last in London. While many of Martha’s experiences parallel those in Lessing’s own life—including her two early marriages and her departure from Rhodesia—Lessing has emphasized that the series is a “study in the individual conscience in its relations with the collective” and any one-to-one comparisons made between her and Martha miss the writer’s larger intentions.
Taken as a whole, the novels make up a formal bildungsroman (novel of education), more than 1800 pages long, about the developing consciousness of the heroine, Martha Quest. Coming of age in the first novel, Martha bridles at the stifling institutions and conventions of the white society in colonial Africa, most particularly the unjust treatment of the native population. She leaves her childhood farm and a conventional marriage for life in the city—a life of political rebellion and sexual discovery. Finally, in the wake of World War II, Martha leaves Africa for London. While Lessing completed the series with The Four-Gated City, critics often have remarked on how different this fifth and final volume is from the other four. Moving beyond straightforward realism in the portrayal of Martha’s life, Lessing offers a powerful apocalyptic vision of the post-nuclear world, circa 2000 A.D. that presages the experimental fiction she would write in later years, including her 1999 book Mara and Dann: An Adventure.
Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century—their “climate of ethical judgement”—to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. The first three Children of Violence books helped establish her as a major radical writer, but Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962). This novel was a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.
Attacked for being “unfeminine” in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.” As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf “tries to live with the freedom of a man,” a point Lessing seems to confirm: “These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her “inner-space fiction” deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979–1983). These reflect Lessing’s interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.
Lessing’s other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbor, 1983, and If the Old Could…, 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. In the last decade of the twentieth century, Lessing has published a variety of books including The Real Thing (stories, 1992), African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (reportage, 1992), Love, Again (novel, 1996), and two superb volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997). Her most recent book is the novel Ben, In the World, a sequel to The Fifth Child, which was published in 2000.
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ALSO BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass Is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor If the Old Could…
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
“CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES” SERIES
Re: Colonized Planet 5-Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
“CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” SERIES
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
SHORT STORIES
This Was the Old Chief’s Country
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
Stories
African Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches
OPERA
The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight (Music by Philip Glass)
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Particularly Cats…And Rufus
African Laughter
The Doris Lessing Reader
Copyright
LANDLOCKED. Copyright © 1965, 1966 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition October 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-199182-0
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Four
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
About the Author
Other Books by Doris Lessing
Copyright
About the Publisher