When Doris Lessing left Southern Rhodesia in 1949 at the age of thirty to go to London accompanied by her younger son, Peter, she kept in her luggage the manuscript of the novel that was to launch her as a famous novelist and help her to make a fresh start in life as an independent woman writer. As Claire Sprague wrote, The Grass Is Singing (1950) “stands on its own. It also looks ahead to other novels.” (Sprague, 1987, 20). In her Nobel Prize video interview Lessing referred to The Grass Is Singing as the best novel she had ever written (Mullan, 2008). Immediately published by Michael Joseph, it was unanimously acclaimed by critics as a major book. No significant novel had yet been published after the war, and in …
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Citation: Brevet, Anne-Laure. "The Grass Is Singing". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 September 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=713, accessed 22 November 2024.]
