The Grass Is Singing
SynopsisPlot
Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm works its slow poison. Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of Moses, an enigmatic black servant. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses—master and slave—are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion, until their psychic tension explodes with devastating consequences.
Story
About this book
The Grass Is Singing, published in 1950, is Doris Lessing's first novel. Set on a struggling farm in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), it follows Mary Turner, a young woman who leaves a comfortable social life in town to marry Dick Turner, a farmer unable to make his land profitable. Over the years, isolation and poverty wear away at Mary's sense of self. The couple's failing crops and mounting debts mirror a marriage that offers neither companionship nor escape.
Mary's growing despair takes a new shape when Moses, a Black farmworker, is assigned to work in the house. The dynamic between them develops along lines of authority, dependence, attraction, and hostility, all set against the rigid racial hierarchy of colonial society. Lessing draws these tensions with restraint, showing how the social order both produces and punishes the feelings it tries to suppress.
The novel opens with a newspaper report of Mary's death, so the story unfolds as a reconstruction of how events reached that point. Lessing, who grew up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, draws on the landscape and social structures she observed firsthand during her years there.
