The Grass is Singing

Abstract

The Grass is Singing,¹ was published in 1950, soon after Lessing’s arrival in England from South Africa. This first novel has been seen by many critics as mainly about the issue of racial discrimination. It has been widely welcomed as the most successful colonial novel since The Story of an African Farm of 1883. However, the political aspect is but one of the many issues of the novel. The Grass is Singing records the decay and disintegration of both society and the individual owing to lack of balance on both levels. Since that early novel, Lessing has been consciously concerned with understanding and exploring the relationship between the individual and the collective, revealing her belief that the hope for man lies in the balance between his private and social selves. Her insistence on the importance of descent — of developing the inner realm of consciousness as an initial step in order to achieve a healthy relationship with the collective — forms the pivot of this early novel, where Mary Turner’s failure to understand her inner self intersects with the oppressive social pressure of her environment. That interaction is the cornerstone to understanding the tragedy developed in The Grass is Singing.