To Room Nineteen Summary

Doris Lessing’s 1963 short story “To Room Nineteen” explores the themes of female independence and personal freedom—and how difficult these are to achieve, especially in the time the story was written. Readers who are familiar with Virginia Woolf’s famous essay "A Room of One’s Own" will notice similar ideas here. Lessing, a Nobel Prize-winning writer who worked in many different styles and genres, often questioned social norms and broke traditional boundaries in her writing. One of her most famous and frequently reprinted stories, “To Room Nineteen” is included in the 8th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F.

The story starts by describing a marriage that looks perfect on the surface. Susan and Matthew Rawlings seem like an ideal couple: “Not only they, but others, felt they were well matched” (2544). However, from the very first sentence, the narrator hints that their marriage is not as perfect as it seems: “This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence” (2544).

For the first few paragraphs, the narrator—who knows everything about the characters and events—goes into detail about how ordinary and stable Susan and Matthew’s marriage appears. Susan, the main character, marries Matthew, leaves her job when she becomes pregnant, and stays home to raise their four children while Matthew earns a good salary. According to their friends, neighbors, and society in general, Susan has everything she should want. She plans to return to work once the children grow up, and she and Matthew expect to spend their later years happily together.

At one point, Matthew admits to having an affair. Susan is not entirely surprised; she sees it as something normal and even expected—“no one can be faithful to another person for a whole lifetime” (2546). Yet, at times, she still feels deeply hurt by it—“she would sometimes be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness” (2547). She starts realizing that her so-called perfect marriage and life are not actually fulfilling, even though she cannot quite explain what is missing.

Once their youngest children, a pair of twins, start school, Susan finds herself with too much free time. She tries to stay busy and tells herself that she just needs to “learn to be [her]self again” after spending 12 years as a wife and mother (2549). At first, she adjusts to having more time alone, but she starts dreading the children’s school holidays. When they are home, she finds herself becoming angry at them for no real reason. She feels guilty about her behavior, and Matthew tries to comfort her, but nothing seems to help.

Susan continues to feel unhappy and confused. She cannot understand why she feels so distant from her family. She even starts imagining a "devil" as a way to explain her growing unhappiness: “He is lurking in the garden and sometimes even in the house, and he wants to get into me and to take me over” (2553). At one point, she even believes she actually sees this devil in her garden.

After this strange experience, Susan decides she needs a private space for herself. She had previously tried to set aside “Mother’s Room” in their home, but it had not worked. She asks Matthew for some money every week without telling him exactly what she will use it for. She plans to rent a small room in a cheap hotel and hires a young German woman named Sophie Traub to help take care of the children. Matthew is unsure about Susan’s request but eventually agrees, not understanding what she really needs the money for. Susan begins visiting Fred’s Hotel every week, where she stays in Room 19.

In this rented room, Susan enjoys being completely alone. Over time, the “room […] become[s] more her own than the house she live[s] in” (2559). In Room 19, she feels free from all the roles she plays in daily life—she is no longer a wife or mother. She does not worry about figuring out exactly who she is; she simply enjoys the time alone. However, when she returns home, she feels like “an imposter” in her own family (2559).

Eventually, Matthew starts wondering where Susan goes every week. He hires a private detective, who finds out about her secret room at the hotel. When Susan realizes that Matthew has discovered her secret, she returns home early. She goes to her bedroom and watches as Sophie takes care of her sick daughter, offering comfort in a way that makes Susan feel even more distant from her family.

Matthew assumes that Susan has been meeting a lover at the hotel. Instead of telling him the real reason for her visits, Susan lies and says she has been having an affair. She knows that this will be easier for him to understand than the truth. Matthew then admits to having a long-term affair himself and even suggests that they should all have lunch together—his lover, Susan, and Susan’s fictional “Michael Plant.” Susan is shocked by how casually he accepts the situation, but she understands that, in their social circle, this arrangement would be seen as a sign of “civilized tolerance” (2563).

Matthew still does not understand Susan’s real struggles or her need for personal space. Susan realizes that if she were gone, Matthew would eventually remarry, possibly to his current lover or even to Sophie, who is already acting like a mother to the children. With this thought in mind, Susan returns to Room 19 one last time. She closes the windows, blocks the door with a rug, and turns on the gas. As she breathes in the fumes, she “[is] quite content lying there, listening to the faint soft hiss of the gas that pour[s] into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drift[s] off into the dark river” (2565). The story ends with her apparent suicide, bringing the “failure in intelligence” mentioned at the beginning to a tragic conclusion.