a book
Martha Quest
Doris Lessing · 1952 · 248 pages
The heroine of this powerful, searching novel is a passionate and intelligent young woman whose ideals are totally at odds with the life she observes around her. The daughter of provincial parents, Martha Quest has been raised in a small-minded town in Central Africa - a community where hypocrisy, intolerance, and mindless traditionalism prevail. The book, which traces Martha from adolescence through an ill-conceived marriage, depicts her abrasive relationships with her elders, her contemporaries, and society as a whole. Martha Quest is a true child of this century. Her personal conflicts mirror the convulsions and aspirations of our her successful rebellion, her liberation and its tragic failures, and finally her despair transmuted into a relentless determination to understand life.
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Judy Blume
“I was swept into another world by these five novels. I went from reading one to another to another. Still, the first, Martha Quest, remains my favorite. It was my husband, George, who introduced me to them.”↗
Barbara Kingsolver
“When I read it, I was a young woman, I was an adolescent bristling against the constraints of my culture, of my place… [Doris Lessing] was writing about racism. She was writing about sexism and segregation, and these bigger issues that I had never really understood could be the substance of literature.”↗