Lessing portrays the coming-of-age of her young protagonist through the use of fluid language that emphasizes the 'thing-whithin´, the restless adolescent spirit, trapped inside a changing body she's still getting used to. Martha, who is fifteen at the beginning of the novel, feels stifled by her parents and surroundings. The impoverished farm in rural Rhodesia, ruled over by her disillusioned sickly father and her overbearing mother, is too narrow a setting for Martha, who hungers for books, ex...

This was an uneven read for me from the usually stellar Lessing. It follows a bildungsroman model as the eponymous Martha is 15 when the book opens, 18 and just married when it closes in 1939 with the outbreak of WW2 hovering around the corner. Martha is the sort of character I love: awkward, politically-engaged though naive, unsure of how to move from intellectual positions to activism, rebellious, at odds with her parents and conservative South African society. We see her adrift on her parents...

A Portrait of Settler Colonial Life in The Twentieth CenturyMartha Quest, the protagonist of this book, is a young white woman coming of age in a deeply and violently racist and very anti-semitic African British colonial society south of the equator. The story starts in the period before the second world war, during the Spanish civil war, and ends during Hitler's invasion of Bohemia. Living on a farm, with her British family of impoverished farmers parented by a father constantly reliving his fi...

Part of The Year of Reading Women group reads. Overall, I like Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook was lovely, The Good Terrorist was interesting, and I'd been meaning to get back into her work for a while. A multi-volume read as part of a group of Goodreaders? Sure, I'll take that on. Martha Quest, the eponymous character of this volume, grows up on a rural African farm, chatting with the local shopkeeper's boys who she relies on for books as well. She's well-read, spunky, but definitely a produ...

Rebellious, seventeen year old Martha's mother doesn't approve of the way she handles her finances. "Well, it's my money!" snaps the daughter. Mom helpfully points out that she's not yet of age, and if it came down to a court case the judge would rule that she was within her rights in stopping Martha from making unwise purchases. But for some reason this doesn't improve matters.Teenage girls! Aren't they just impossible sometimes?

Not really a book for. Don't think Doris Lessing's books is for me in general. Didn't connect with either the story or characters and didn't really have an intresting reading experience

The first book of one of my favorite series, The Children of Violence quintet. I read this for the first time about forty years ago. It is semi-autobiographical -- I am re-reading the series before reading Lessing's autobiography, to see how close it is; Martha Quest, the heroine of the series, is taken from age 16 through her marriage in this volume (set in 1937-1939). This is not the best book of the series, and it really owes its interest in large part to the protagonist's development in the

I pulled an old, sellotaped-together 70s paperback of Martha Quest from a bag of books belonging to a friend of mine, vaguely expecting something stodgy and of-its-time. It had me completely entranced. A meticulous, deeply-felt Bildungsroman, it really does what this kind of book is supposed to do (and so rarely succeeds in doing), which is to make you feel like you're there, experiencing this life along with the protagonist – experiencing, in this case, what it's like to grow up in colonial Afr...

Someone called her the “reluctant heroine”, the Nobel Literature prize recipient of 2007, Doris Lessing. At 88, she still heard voices from her childhood. She had been born in Persia. Then she lived in South Rhodesia (what’s today Zimbabwe). At that age she feared for our present civilization: “it’s going to dissolve”:” the precarious patterns of civilization we set”; “we’re living the collapse of society”Julian Mitchell, a friend of Lessing, said about her: “Africa is her soul”. He i

At the start Martha Quest is a fifteen year old English girl (though time flows quickly... she’s 19 or 20 at the 40% mark and remains about that age for the rest of the book). At the beginning, it’s about 1935: between the World Wars, Hitler is name-dropped, and Martha lives on a farm in Africa. She’s isolated and doesn’t really have a friend her age, another girl, to talk to except for one whose outlook doesn’t match hers. She’s literary, argumentative, and sometimes perplexing, at least to me....

Since she won the Nobel (and received it with what I thought was funny, dry nonchalance--utterly unimpressed with herself) I finally made good on a years-old, smiling-nodding pledge to a former roommate of my brother's (Ploughman anyone?) that I would check out some of Doris Lessing's stuff. It helped that there was a hilariously large English books section at the Brockihaus (massive 2nd hand store common in Switzerland) where we went halloween costume shopping last year. I made my Palin powersu...

Doris Lessing is described as "one of the most serious, intelligent and honest writers of the whole post-war generation"(SUNDAY TIMES). I found her book curious. Although I appreciated her in-depth exploration of a young woman's transition from living with her parents on a sheltered farm in Africa to working in an urban setting with all its temptations, I had trouble liking the protagonist. She couldn't make up her mind, and all her flip-flopping was annoying. I couldn't wait to finish the book,...

Martha Quest: In Search of One's SelfThis novel was read in conjunction with the group 2015: The Year of Reading Women/a>Review to follow. All things in moderation. Theraflu. Avoiding prose in the throes of delirium.

A coming of age story. A story of a girls journey trying to deal with a mentally disconnected (results of war) father and a pathetically jealous mother. How she does this, is what broke my heart.

I remember seeing the cover of this book and honestly being interested in the author. the late Doris Lessing simply did not disappoint.Its a good start, to be honest with you. The characters are introduced slowly, no doubt, but the time taken is worth the trouble in my honest opinion. Told in a first person perspective and being a historical fiction-cum-autobiography of the author, you follow the story of Martha Quest living in South Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe), as she progresses to woman hoo...

She read as if this were a process discovered by herself; as if there had never been a guide to it. She read like a bird collecting twigs for a nest. She picked up each new book, using the author’s name as a sanction, as if the book were something separate and self-contained, a world in itself. For Martha, life was more than a shelter of similar ideologies. She did not want to become a monomaniac; rather, she was interested in exploring and understanding culture and thought, similari

We are caught in the flow of Martha's psychological time. Years pass in a treacly flood of hot, irritated afternoons, a single moment of transcendent commune with the universe lasts hours (and takes up several pages), and busy days in the city expand to fill decades with a handful of weeks. I can imagine readers complaining about 'pace' since little happens, but the book engages me, Martha's time is the slow river of story I share gladly with her, and I am happy to swim leisurely in her companyI...

I quite liked The Good Terrorist, so was prepared to sink into some more litfic by the renowned Doris Lessing. I'd heard that Children of Violence is one of those covert speculative fiction forays that litfic authors sometimes indulge in.If so, it's certainly not in evidence here. (From reading reviews of the subsequent books, it appears the only "speculative" element comes at the very end of the last book.) Martha Quest is basically a bildungsroman about a young Englishwoman in South Africa in

Like a lot of frustrated fifteen-year-old girls, Martha Quest is horrified by her parents' convictions. She lives with her parents on a farm in colonial Rhodesia some time before WWII, and she spends most of her time dreaming and reading and sticking to herself. Her parents don't approve of the options Martha might have for friendship, aside from the neighbor's daughter who is heading down the same road as Martha's parents - in other words: boring, stuck-up, shallow.Over the next few years Marth...

Doris Lessing's 5 volume "Children of Violence" series"Martha Quest" is the first book in Doris Lessing's "Children of Violence" series. It is well written, keeps your interest, and gives you a lot of historical as well as autobiographical data. The details and descriptions of places and characters make you feel that it's all real and happening. The character of Martha Quest is many faceted, and I was very curious to see what happens in her life. She is British, growing up in Africa with all of