Martha Quest Summary

Doris Lessing’s novel Martha Quest (1952) follows the life of Martha Quest as she grows older. It is the first book in a five-part series called The Children of Violence. The story takes place from 1934 to 1938 in Southern Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, which was a British colony in southern Africa. Lessing lived there from 1925 to 1949.

Martha has a troubled adolescence, shaped by one world war and the approach of another. She feels disconnected from the big events of history, where people act in large numbers and change the world, yet they also get caught up in small, everyday social matters.

At the beginning of the novel, Martha is fifteen years old and lives on a struggling farm in Africa with her parents. She is very observant and notices early on that people say one thing but do another. This realization makes her unhappy. To cope, she turns to books, borrowing them from two educated Jewish men who live nearby. Through reading, she tries to understand how the world works, while also dealing with the challenges in her own life. As a young British girl in the twentieth century, Martha must navigate issues of growing up, as well as matters of race, class, and women’s rights.

In the first scene, Martha is trying to read while sitting with her mother, who is speaking with a Dutch woman from the Afrikaans colonies. The conversation between the two women feels fake. They are not real friends. Martha’s mother looks down on the Dutch woman because she takes pride in having two married daughters. At the same time, Martha’s mother believes Martha should focus on having a career instead of marriage. Martha is annoyed by the interruption to her reading and notices the hypocrisy of both women. She resents that they talk about her as if she is not there. Frustrated, she declares that she despises both of them.

Tired of her controlling parents and the narrow-minded people around her who only talk about school and marriage, Martha longs for freedom. She wants to escape her mother’s strict, cold parenting style and her father, who is stuck in memories of World War I. Feeling trapped and uncertain about her future, she decides to leave her small farming community and move to a nearby fictional city called Zambesia, in South Africa. There, she gets a job as an assistant in a law office.

Although Martha fears being trapped—by society or history—she ironically believes that one way to escape is through a relationship with a man. However, in her search for independence and self-discovery, she makes bad decisions. Eventually, she allows a Jewish musician named Adolph, or Dolly, to become her first sexual partner. Deep down, Martha knows she does not feel true passion for him. Instead, she is drawn to him because of the discrimination he faces as a Jewish man.

For the first two years of her new life, Martha spends time with a group of reckless young white people from different backgrounds. She works during the day and parties at night in local restaurants. Even though she has left her parents behind, their influence still affects her. In many ways, she is trying not only to be better and more independent but also to be completely different from her mother.

As World War II approaches, Martha begins dating a much older civil servant named Douglas. Many of her friends start getting married and having children as war looms, and at nineteen, Martha gets caught up in this mindset as well. Like her friends, she rushes into marriage with Douglas, even though she does not truly love him. She feels pressured to make their relationship official. After their wedding, Martha is shocked by her own contradictions. She feels like several different people exist within her, each one in conflict with the others. Yet, deep inside, she senses that all these versions of herself share the same unnamed and shapeless longing, like water flowing in different directions.

By the end of the novel, Martha tries to convince herself that she loves Douglas and that their marriage is based on more than just physical attraction. However, a small but clear voice inside her tells her that the marriage is doomed to fail before too long.