 First edition | |
| Author | Doris Lessing |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Peter Rudland |
| Language | English |
| Series | Children of Violence |
| Publisher | Michael Joseph |
Publication date | 1952 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | 0451028740 |
| Followed by | A Proper Marriage |
Martha Quest (1952) is the second novel of British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing, and the first of the five-volume semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, which traces Martha Quest’s life to middle age. The other volumes in The Children of Violence are A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969).[1]
Martha Quest is set in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, where Lessing lived from 1925 until 1949.[2] At the beginning of the novel Martha is fifteen years old, "living on an impoverished African farm with her parents; a girl of passionate vitality, avid for experience and for self-knowledge, bitterly resentful of the conventional narrowness of her home life". She then becomes a typist in the provincial capital where "she begins to encounter the real life she is so eager to experience and understand."[3] Lessing's first novel The Grass Is Singing published in 1950, also takes place in Southern Rhodesia, and, set during the 1940s, deals with the racial politics between the British settlers and Africans in that country.
Novelist C. P. Snow, in a review of Martha Quest, in the Sunday Times, described Doris Lessing, as "one of the most powerfully equipped young novelists now writing."[4]