The Children of Violence

Abstract

The Children of Violence sequence was published between 1952 and 1969 and consists of five novels: Martha Quest (1952); A Proper Marriage (1954); A Ripple from the Storm (1958); Landlocked (1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969). In this chapter these five novels will be looked at in turn, but it is important to remember that their publication was interspersed with that of other novels, novellas and short stories. This accounts, in part, for the great differences between the early and later books in the series. Mrs Lessing has called the Children of Violence a Bildungsroman, that is, the story of a young person’s development and education in society. The story is not, however, written from a single consistent viewpoint, as if Mrs Lessing had reached a certain stage of understanding and written all five novels from that particular perspective. Over the seventeen years between the publication of Martha Quest and The Four-Gated City she examines a wide range of social, personal and artistic assumptions, including the problems inherent in writing fiction. Thus, when she returns to the sequence after a gap of seven years with Landlocked in 1965 (having published The Golden Notebook in 1962), there is a noticeable change in her angle of vision.