The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.

“Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the past 100 years, a shrewd visionary. . . . Her new, short, haunting novel . . . succors us with . . . unforgettable visual images. We shiver and marvel as we lose ourselves in time.”— The Times (London) In her visionary novel Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing introduced a brother and sister battling through a future landscape defined by extreme climates in the north and south. In this new novel the odyssey continues. Dann is grown up, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who saves him from the depths of despair. Here, too, are Mara’s daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. Like its predecessor, this brilliant novel from one of our greatest living writers explains as much about our world as it does about the future we may be heading toward.

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

A greater part of the feminist movement has considered traditional psychology to be both a product and a defense of the status quo, a patriarchal society. Here, Barbara Hill Rigney explores emerging feminist psychology by applying it to literary works by women who have depicted the relationship between madness and the female condition. The result is a fascinating and illuminating exposition, certain to be welcomed by students and scholars in literature and women's studies, as well as those in sociology and psychology whose interests include feminism and problems of women and society. Among the works Rigney considers are Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, all of which depict insanity in relation to sexual politics. These authors portray a patriarchal social system which, in itself, manifests symptoms of collusive madness in the form of war or sexual oppression and is thereby seen as threatening to female psychological survival. Each of Rigney's author subjects sees her protagonist as tragically divided between male society's prescribed roles for women and a sense of an authentic self. Thus emerges a pattern, common to all works, in which the divided self is reflected by the inevitable juxtaposition of the protagonist to a doppelgänger, an "insane" self, an extension of the protagonist who herself can be regarded as sane only by degree. A return to "true" sanity is traced through the patterns found in the selected works. Rigney explores the literary metaphor of the return of Demeter or the Amazon mother to restore the alienated female protagonists. In order to begin the return from psychosis, Rigney concludes, they must find the mother within themselves in the form of a feminist consciousness of self-worth.

An original and compelling appraisal of this important international literary figure

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.