A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Grass Is Singing"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Grass Is Singing", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780028671284

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The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing

1950

Introduction

The Grass Is Singing (1950), set in the African colony of Southern Rhodesia in the mid-twentieth century, is the debut novel of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. Born to British parents in Iran, Lessing moved with her family to what would eventually become the independent nation of Zimbabwe when she was six years old, as her father jumped at an opportunity to buy cheap farmland from the colonial government—land that was seized from the native populations by deception and force. Lessing would live in Southern Rhodesia for the next two dozen years, gaining full and detailed knowledge of the people, the colonial operations, and the way of life there.

A British man's farm is the primary setting of The Grass Is Singing, which opens with the aftermath of a murder. Mary Turner has been slain on the veranda of the home she shared with her husband, and their household servant, Moses, has confessed to the crime. But a recent visitor feels that something is wrong, as neighboring farmer Charlie Slatter coordinates the response to the crime. The novel jumps from this inconclusive introduction back to the beginnings of Mary's colonial life, the events that led up to her marriage, and the dissolution of her life on her poor-luck husband's farm. The tale's implications extend beyond the characters' lives not only to broader possibilities in relations between races but also to the entire misbegotten European colonial project in Africa.

Author Biography

Lessing was born as Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia—modern-day Iran—to a manager for the Imperial Bank of Persia and his wife. Lessing's father had been wounded in World War I, severely enough to have a leg amputated at the thigh; he married a woman who nursed him at London's Royal Free Hospital. On leave in 1925, Mr. Tayler took his family from Persia to England, first detouring through Russia and there gaining an awareness that would lead him to claim a degree of expertise in Communism—a future interest of his daughter's. Back at London's Empire Exhibition, Mr. Tayler was inspired to buy some three thousand acres of land at ten shillings an acre in Southern Rhodesia. The family moved to a house at the top of a kopje, or small hill, from which they had a view of many miles of surrounding valleys, rivers, and mountains.

The house was a couple hundred miles south of the Zambezi River and a hundred miles west of Mozambique, and with her brother often away at school, the young Lessing lived in an open, often difficult isolation. Her mother tried to enforce stiff bourgeois values in her children, even as their house—made of mud walls and a thatch roof—was often shared with local wildlife, including the occasional rats, lizards, and even snakes in the roof, along with frogs hopping across the floor during the wet season. A singular quirk of Lessing's childhood was a tree that for a number of years, despite being repeatedly cut down, annually grew up through the floor directly under her bed.

With her mother experiencing—and stolidly recovering from—a period of neurosis, while her father grew increasingly distracted and distant as his farming venture failed to yield wealth, Lessing dealt with life's challenges as they came. She was sent to a convent school in the colonial capital of Salisbury but