The Fifth Child
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
1.
Primary Texts: Narrative Prose
Doris
Lessing. The
Fifth Child.
(1988)
Key Terms (tags): narrative prose,
twentieth century, novel
Supporting References:
- Birch, Dinah. "Lessing, Doris." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
This source focuses
on the author and not on the information sheet object text.
“Lessing, Doris (1919– ) Née Tayler, novelist and short story
writer, born in Persia (Iran) of British parents and brought up on a
farm in Southern Rhodesia. She left school at 15 and worked in
various jobs. After the break‐up of her first marriage she became
involved in radical politics. She remarried in 1945, but in 1949 left
for England with her youngest child and the manuscript of her first
novel to be published, The Grass is Singing (1950), the
story of the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black
servant. From this period on she supported herself and her son by her
writing. Her quintet Children of Violence (1952–69) is a
Bildungsroman,
tracing the history of Martha Quest from her childhood in Rhodesia,
through post‐war Britain, to an apocalyptic ending in 2000. Perhaps
her best‐known work is The Golden Notebook (1962), a
lengthy and ambitious novel hailed as a landmark by the women's
movement. Later novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell
(1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), enter the realm of
‘inner space fiction’, exploring mental illness and the breakdown
of society. The sequence of five novels collectively entitled Canopus
in Argos: Archives (1979–83) marks a complete break with
traditional realism, describing the epic and mythic events of a
fictional universe with a remarkable freedom of invention. In order
to test the market for fiction by unknown writers, she submitted two
far more conventional novels to her publishers under the pseudonym of
Jane Somers. Initially turned down, Diary of a Good Neighbour
(1983) and If the Old Could (1984) were eventually published
and their authorship subsequently revealed. Other novels include The
Good Terrorist (1985), describing the behaviour of a group of
middle‐class revolutionaries in a London squat, and The Cleft
(2007), in which a Roman senator describes the creation of mankind
through a study of a primitive society entirely populated by women.
Two evocative volumes of autobiography, Under my Skin (1994)
and Waiting in the Shade (1997), cover Lessing's life up
until 1962, and many other works of fiction and non‐fiction display
her concern with politics, with the changing destiny of women, with a
fear of technological disaster, her love of cats and her interest in
Sufism
and the works of Idries
*Shah. These themes are all explored in Time
Bites (2004), a collection of essays which almost amounts to a
further autobiography. Her Collected Stories, 2 vols (1978),
show a similarly broad range of interests. In 2007, to her evident
surprise, she was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature and devoted her acceptance
speech to the importance of books and her concern that the internet
was resulting in ‘a fragmenting culture’, replacing the ‘great
store of literature’ that once produced a truly international
community of readers.”
- a
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