Plot summary
The Four-Gated City, set in postwar London, is structured in four sections with an appendix. Martha arrives in London around 1950 and accepts a job as live-in secretary to Mark Coldridge. Mark is a novelist with one son, Francis; his wife, Lynda, is in a psychiatric hospital. Martha intends this employment to be temporary, but she elects to stay with the Coldridge family after Mark's brother Colin defects to the Soviet Union, leaving behind his son, Paul. Colin's defection subjects the family to scrutiny by both the government and the press. Already more progressive than his Tory parents, Mark shifts politically to the left, briefly becoming a communist and, in the longer term, engaging actively with the anti-nuclear movement. Mark, Martha, and other members of the Coldridge family participate in the Aldermaston Marches.
Martha becomes integral to the family, remaining with them until the Coldridge house is "compulsorily purchased for demolition, or redevelopment" [5] in the late 1960s. She assists Mark with his writing and political work, becomes his intermittent sexual partner, and helps to raise Francis and Paul to adulthood. She also develops a strong relationship with Lynda, who returns home and lives in the basement flat of the Coldridge house, still married to Mark, for most of the novel. Lynda has periodic "breakdowns," but in time Martha recognizes that Lynda "need never have been ill": instead, she has a legitimate capacity for telepathy, and had been "made a psychological cripple" by a society that could not grasp "the possibility that they were calling people mad who merely possessed certain faculties." [6] Martha realizes that she possesses a similar capacity, which she develops over the course of "a decade of private experimenting." [7] After Lynda divorces Mark, he remarries and moves abroad with his second wife.
The novel's appendix comprises a series of letters collected by Francis Coldridge's stepdaughter after "the Catastrophe," which took place in 1978. The specific nature of the Catastrophe is never specified, but Martha speculates in a letter that it was a nuclear detonation or a release of nerve gases following a fire at Porton Down. [8] Most of the people of Britain are killed in this event, and the nation is largely rendered uninhabitable. Martha spends the last years of her life with a small group of refugees on an island off the northwest coast of Scotland and dies around 1997.
Genre
In an author's note, Doris Lessing writes that The Four-Gated City “is what the Germans call a Bildungsroman .”" [9] Yet the novel is not typical of the genre in some respects. As Susan A. Gohlman notes, while the stereotypical Bildungsroman protagonist is an “innocent young man,” Martha “is neither a man nor young” at the outset of the novel. The first four novels of the Children of Violence sequence “trace the heroine’s… formation from childhood to adulthood, characteristically emphasizing those experiences that place her in direct confrontation with life; also, they focus on her degree of success in assimilating these experiences as she attempts to find her niche in society.” Yet “at the final point of integration with society, the ultimate goal of the Bildungsprozess… Martha breaks with tradition: once she has reached the stage where she has learned all that her immediate world has to offer, she rejects, rather than affirms, the identity which she has created out of her experience.” [10] Molly Hite observes, similarly, that “Martha, who for four volumes of the Children of Violence series has been a more or less conventional protagonist, dissolves into a series of roles, a vehicle for impersonal forces, one perspective on a version of a reality approached from other directions by other characters. Her individual experience is finally so unimportant to the plot that it is unclear when or how she dies… The effect of this diffusing of personality is to transform what had appeared to be a five-volume bildungsroman, the ongoing saga of a woman’s personal growth and development, into an experimental narrative that culminates in a repudiation of the assumptions about personality and history that make the bildungsroman possible.” [11]
In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung and Roman ("novel").
Doris May Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia, where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
The Fifth Child is a short novel by the British writer Doris Lessing, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988, and since translated into several languages. It describes the changes in the happy life of a married couple, Harriet and David Lovatt, as a consequence of the birth of Ben, their fifth child. A sequel, Ben, in the World (2000) recounts Ben's life after he has left his family.
Doris Troy was an American R&B singer and songwriter, known to her fans as "Mama Soul". Her biggest hit was "Just One Look", a top 10 hit in 1963.
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta is a 1979 science fiction novel by Doris Lessing, and is the first book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series. It was first published in the United States in December 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, and in the United Kingdom in November 1979 by Jonathan Cape. Shikasta is also the name of the fictional planet featured in the novel.
Shere Hite was an American-born German sex educator and feminist. Her sexological work focused primarily on female sexuality. Hite built upon biological studies of sex by Masters and Johnson and by Alfred Kinsey. She also referenced theoretical, political and psychological works associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, such as Anne Koedt's essay "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm". She renounced her United States citizenship in 1995 to become German.
Jenny Diski FRSL was an English writer. She had a troubled childhood, but was taken in and mentored by the novelist Doris Lessing; she lived in Lessing's house for four years. Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Martha Longhurst is a fictional character from the British soap opera Coronation Street. She was played by Lynne Carol from the show's inception in 1960, from the second episode until the character's death in 1964.
Canopus in Argos: Archives is a sequence of five science fiction novels by Nobel laureate author Doris Lessing, which portray a number of societies at different stages of development, over a great period of time. The focus is on accelerated evolution guided by advanced species for less advanced species and societies.
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is a 1980 science fiction novel by Doris Lessing. It is the second book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series, the first being Shikasta (1979). It was first published in the United States in March 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, and in the United Kingdom in May 1980 by Jonathan Cape.
The Good Terrorist is a 1985 political novel written by the British novelist Doris Lessing. The book's protagonist is the naïve drifter Alice, who squats with a group of radicals in London and is drawn into their terrorist activities.
Martha Rofheart was an American writer of historical novels, an actress and early in her career, a model.
The Sweetest Dream is a 2001 novel by British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. The novel begins in the 1960s leading up to the 1980s and is set in London and the fictional African nation, Zimlia, a thinly veiled reference to Zimbabwe.
Martha Quest (1952) is the second novel of British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing, and the first of the five-volume semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, which traces Martha Quest’s life to middle age. The other volumes in The Children of Violence are A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969).
A Proper Marriage (1954) is the second novel in British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing five volume, semi-autobiographical, series, Children of Violence. The first volume is Martha Quest (1952), and the others are, A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The Children of Violence series, follows the life of protagonist Martha Quest "from girlhood to middle age".
A Ripple from the Storm (1958) is the third novel in British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing five volume, semi-autobiographical, series, Children of Violence. The first volume is Martha Quest (1952), and the others are, A Proper Marriage (1954), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The Children of Violence series, follows the life of protagonist Martha Quest "from girlhood to middle age".
Landlocked (1965) is the fourth novel in British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing five volume, semi-autobiographical, series, Children of Violence. The first volume is Martha Quest (1952), and the others are, A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The Children of Violence series, follows the life of protagonist Martha Quest "from girlhood to middle age".
The Children of Violence is a sequence of five semi-autobiographical novels by British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing: Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The novels "are strongly influenced by Lessing's rejection of a domestic family role and her involvement with communism." Lessing identifies the sequence as a Bildungsroman.
Agate Nesaule was a Latvian-born American writer and professor of English on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Her 1995 memoir A Woman in Amber won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1996.
