This helped her to write about the white culture in Southern Rhodesia in ‘The Grass Is Singing’. The other one, in which she made fun of the white culture, was mannered. Lessing wrote two books, one of them at long-hand after returning home to the farm. The author has given the reader a place, an event and a social problem all before her narrative begins. She wants to establish an end point in order to examine the extremely flawed society in which it occurs. However, it certainly is not a murder mystery as we are told the suspect has confessed the crime and there is no serious effort to unravel the crime. It begins with a brief newspaper clipping, suggesting the murder of Mary Turner under the headline ‘Murder Mystery’. The author chooses to start this novel by the end. Yet, all these houses had men-servants and the white mistresses spoke to them in high, harassed, angry voice. In African culture, for women to tell a man what to do was impossible. It was said that the white mistresses didn’t know how to treat their servants and obviously it was a sex thing. She had treated him like a friend and then started treating him like a servant. It was a violation of the white behavior.īut she didn’t behave like a white mistress. For example, there was a lady gossiped about in her neighborhood that she allowed her cook-boy to button up the back of her dress and brush her hair.

However, Doris knew perfectly well why he had committed this crime because of her upbringing. She read a newspaper cutting about a white mistress murdered by her black cook, none knows why and he is waiting to be hanged. Lessing realized that she had quite an amazing life but didn’t know how to attack it when she started writing a book. Lessing has written many novels, short stories and tales, drama, poetry and comics of which novels like The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook are the most popular and her works continue to be reprinted.

The grass is singing characters