Doris May Lessing, The Four-Gated City: Children of Violence Novel Sequence

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Published seven years after The Golden Notebook, The Four-Gated City (1969) is the fifth, final and longest volume of the Children of Violence (1952-1969), a series of autobiographical novels including Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), and Landlocked (1965), which relates the various stages of Lessing’s heroine Martha Quest’s life from adolescence onwards. Undeniably one of Doris Lessing’s major works, it was particularly praised by Horace Engdhal, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy in 2007, when Lessing received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This voluminous novel reveals a turning point in Lessing’s writing career. Its …

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Citation: Brevet, Anne-Laure. "The Four-Gated City: Children of Violence Novel Sequence". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 April 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=810, accessed 29 March 2024.]

810 The Four-Gated City: Children of Violence Novel Sequence 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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