The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing (Book Analysis) E-Book

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• Kategorie: Bildung
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• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 23

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Grass is Singing with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, which tells the story of a white couple in Southern Rhodesia during apartheid. Dick Turner is a farmer who continually struggles but fails to make a profit on his farm; Mary gave up her independence and married him out of shame at still being single in her 30s. Their marriage is failing and they both feel frustrated with their lives and frequently lash out at the black workers on the farm where they live. However, Mary, starved of social interaction and intellectual stimulation, gradually becomes close to the black cook Moses, with disastrous consequences for the Turners and for their white compatriots. The Grass is Singing is an excellent example of the realism for which Lessing’s writing is celebrated, and remains one of her best-known and most acclaimed works.

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• A complete plot summary
• Character studies
• Key themes and symbols
• Questions for further reflection

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Leseprobe

DORIS LESSING

ENGLISH NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER

Born in Kermanshah, Persia in 1919.Died in London in 2013.Notable works:The Golden Notebook (1962), novelThis Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951), short story collectionUnder My Skin (1994), autobiography

Born in Persia to English parents, Doris had one younger brother, Harry. As a child she lived first in Persia, then in England, and finally in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father started a farm. She never received a formal education. She was highly outspoken about her political views, which also deeply influenced her writing, and always had a cause that she supported. She left home in 1937 and worked in Salisbury (Harare, Zimbabwe), where she married Frank Charles Wisdom, already pregnant by him. They had two children together but divorced in 1943. Doris, by that point, was deeply engaged with the communist movement (but later broke with it) and married the leader of the communist group, the German Jewish refugee Gottfried Lessing, in 1945. They had a son, Peter, but divorced in 1949. She had been publishing stories and poems in journals already and left Southern Rhodesia with Peter in the same year, eventually settling in England. In 1950, the first of her 26 novels, The Grass is Singing, was published. Lessing was exceedingly successful during her lifetime, receiving many prizes and honorary degrees. In 2007 she finally received the Nobel Prize for Literature, shortly after the publication of her novel The Cleft. She was highly experimental in her writing and wrote realist novels as well as science fiction. One of the main influences on her writing was the philosophy of Idries Shah (Sufi author and teacher, 1924-1996).

THE GRASS IS SINGING

SETTLER NARRATIVE SET IN SOUTHERN RHODESIA

Genre: novelReference edition: Lessing, D. (1994) The Grass is Singing. London: Flamingo.1stedition: 1950Themes: colonialism, Africa, settler society, poverty, postcolonial studies, racism

The Grass is Singing was Lessing’s first novel and was immediately successful. She took the manuscripts with her when she left Southern Rhodesia in 1949. In the novel, she explores language as a means of oppression of the black population in Southern Rhodesia (Maslen, 2017: 3). Lessing was uneasy about the treatment of the country’s black African population (ibid.: 2).