Martha Quest [Hardcover]

Doris May Lessing (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1952

Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing -- and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing's timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A formidable talent." -- -- C. P. Snow

"For sheer poise I don't think there has been a writer to touch her since Jane Austin." -- -- John Wain, Observer

"Stubborn, resilient, wry towards herself, Martha is Doris Lessing's most satisfying and complex characterization. She is a child of her times, of violence, who 'could no more dissociate herself from the violence done by her than a tadpole can live out of water." -- Times (London)

"There are many notable descriptions of adolescent boys and young men in our fiction. There are very few, in the same deep and radical sense, of young women. Mrs. Lessing's study of Martha Quest is one of them." -- New York Times Book Review

"A formidable talent." -- C. P. Snow

"For sheer poise I don't think there has been a writer to touch her since Jane Austin." -- John Wain, Observer

"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." -- Barbara Kingsolver --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time. She lives in north London.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Viking Pr; First Edition edition (June 1952)
• ISBN-10: 9997518578
• ISBN-13: 978-9997518576
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,268,663 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars read "children of violence"..pass it on..read it again, June 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Martha Quest (The Children of Violence, Book 1) (Paperback)

i can't quite fathom why this series is not more widely discussed and celebrated, can only be enormously grateful to the bookstore clerk who was so enamored of it she approached me on some instinct as i browsed the woolf section and said, "you have to read lessing's 'children of violence' series"..i read through all five novels and was struck by lessing's extraordinary insight into the mind (and heart) of young women: with martha quest, the literary characterization of the young woman emerged from half-told shadows in full astounding complexity. this alone makes the series significant. add to that lessing's brilliant writing about organizational politics and psychology, landscape, history, etc etc, and this series is truly a masterpiece. read it, pass it on to friends, read it again.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Introducing Martha Quest, June 30, 2002

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Martha Quest: A Novel (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

We meet Martha Quest as a resentful 15 year old girl, growing up on a farm in Africa. As noted adequately here, this is the first book in her Children of Violence series-- held by many to be Lessings most important body of work (with the exception of _The Golden Notebook_).

I'm one of these Lessing fans from back in the day when _The Golden Notebook_ changed my life, and I haven't read much of her other work. I was impressed by Martha Quest-- it falls in the category of our classic coming-of-age novels, and as such stands well on its own as a novel. Lessing's Martha is at times so frustrating you want to shake her, but I think that's typical for the age of the character portrayed. Martha is all sharp edges-- she can't seem to fit with her parents, the men around her, the people with whom she tries to interact. With the blindness of her age, she's able to acutely feel how hard she has it, without really feeling the struggle of others around her who may have an even more difficult time. By turns infuriating and attractive, it can be painful to read Quest's story precisely because so it's so human as to be disturbingly familiar.

A should-read book.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vital stuff, August 16, 2000

By 

TUCO H. "H. TUCO" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Martha Quest (The Children of Violence, Book 1) (Paperback)

The greatest purchase I ever made in my life was when I picked up a copy of 'African Stories' for $1.75 at a used bookstore in Hollywood. The 30 short stories in that book represented some of the most ecstatic writing I had read since Nabokov and Stendhal. To this day it remains my favorite book. The first two parts of 'Children of Violence'--'Martha Quest' and 'A Proper Marriage'--are like an expansion of some of those stories and a comprehensive analysis of everything that can possibly happen within and without the psyche of a young girl becoming a woman in Southern Africa. I'm not exaggerating when I say that almost every page of these two books is a revelation. They're works of genius pure and simple. In fact, no psychologist could've dug this far. Read them or suffer a permanent lack.