So ends Lessing's Bildungsroman par excellance. This near-700 page breeze block of a book takes Martha from her early 30s to old age, and is set in post-war London. Lessing compelled my attention before even beginning, with a dervish teaching story and a quote from The Edge of the Sea Each of the...
At the start Martha Quest is a fifteen year old English girl (though time flows quickly... she’s 19 or 20 at the 40% mark and remains about that age for the rest of the book). At the beginning, it’s about 1935: between the World Wars, Hitler is name-dropped, and Martha lives on a farm in Africa. ...