Title, dedication, and introductory quotations
But, after overhearing her friends laugh at her as sexless and immature, she resolves to marry, and when Dick Turner asks her she consents, though she has met him only twice. The bulk of the novel is the story of Mary's life.Īfter a loveless, wretched childhood, Mary is contented with her life as an office worker in a city in Rhodesia. The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed by her black servant, Moses. The novel created a sensation when it was first published and became an instant success in Europe and the United States. It takes place in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in southern Africa, during the 1940s and deals with the racial politics between whites and blacks in that country (which was then a British Colony).
That interaction is the cornerstone to understanding the tragedy developed in The Grass is Singing.The Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by the British author Doris Lessing. Her insistence on the importance of descent - of developing the inner realm of consciousness as an initial step in order to achieve a healthy relationship with the collective - forms the pivot of this early novel, where Mary Turner’s failure to understand her inner self intersects with the oppressive social pressure of her environment. Since that early novel, Lessing has been consciously concerned with understanding and exploring the relationship between the individual and the collective, revealing her belief that the hope for man lies in the balance between his private and social selves. The Grass is Singing records the decay and disintegration of both society and the individual owing to lack of balance on both levels. However, the political aspect is but one of the many issues of the novel. It has been widely welcomed as the most successful colonial novel since The Story of an African Farm of 1883. This first novel has been seen by many critics as mainly about the issue of racial discrimination.
The Grass is Singing, 1 was published in 1950, soon after Lessing’s arrival in England from South Africa.