influenced by the writings of the renegade psychologist R. D. Laing and by the principles of Sufism (the mystical, ecstatic aspects of Islam), Lessing's realistic investigations of social issues took a different turn. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), she explores myth and fantasy, restrained within a broadly realist context. In a series of novels with the general title Canopus in Argos: Archives (written between 1979 and 1983), she draws on her reading of the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, and the Koran and borrows conventions from science fiction to describe the efforts of a superhuman, extraterrestrial race to guide human history. The novels convey the scope of huma n suffering in the twentieth century with a rare imaginative power. On completion of this novel sequence, Lessing took the unusual step of publishing two pseudonymous novels (now known jointly as The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1983-84), in which she reverted to the realist mode with which she is most widely associated. The Good Terrorist (1985) is also written in the style of documentary realism, but The Fifth Child (1988) combines elements of realism and fantasy, exploring the effect on a happy family of the birth of a genetically abnormal, nonhuman child. Her work since the early 1990s has included two candid volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), the four short novels that comprise The Grandmothers (2004), several other novels, and a series of short stories. Some of these stories?which deal with racial and social dilemmas as well as with loneliness, the claims of politics, the problems of aging (especially for
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women), the conflict between the generations, and a whole spectrum of problems of alienation and isolation?have a special pungency and force. Lessing is very much a writer of her time, deeply involved with the changing patterns of thought, feeling, and culture during the last fifty years. She has consistently explored and tested the boundaries of realist technique, without resort to formal experimentalism. Published just on the cusp of second-wave feminism, the story reprinted here, 'To Room Nineteen,' is a psychologically penetrating study of a woman who finds ultimate fulfillment in neither her marriage nor her children and, feeling trapped by traditional gender roles, seeks solitude in?to echo the title of Virginia Woolf's feminist classic about gender, space, and identity?a room of her own.
To Room Nineteen
This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings' marriage was grounded in intelligence.
They were older when they married than most of their married friends: in their well-seasoned late twenties. Both had had a number of affairs, sweet rather than bitter; and when they fell in love?for they did fall in love?had known each other for some time. They joked that they had saved each other 'for the real thing.' That they had waited so long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible discrimination. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt) probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid, self- doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.
Not only they, but others, felt they were well matched: their friends' delight was an additional proof of their happiness. They had played the same roles, male and female, in this group or set, if such a wide, loosely connected, constantly changing constellation of people could be called a set. They had both become, by virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience people to whom others came for advice. They could be, and were, relied on. It was one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably because of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course! How right! How was it we never thought of it before!
And so they married amid general rejoicing, and because of their foresight
and their sense for what was probable, nothing was a surprise to them.
Both had well-paid jobs. Matthew was a subeditor on a large London news
paper, and Susan worked in an advertising firm. He was not the stuff of which
editors or publicised journalists are made, but he was much more than 'a
subeditor,' being one of the essential background people who in fact steady,
inspire and make possible the people in the limelight. He was content with
this position. Susan had a talent for commercial drawing. She was humorous
about the advertisements she was responsible for, but she did not feel strongly
about them one way or the other.
Both, before they married, had had pleasant flats, but they felt it unwise to
base a marriage on either flat, because it might seem like a submission of
personality on the part of the one whose flat it was not. They moved into a
new flat in South Kensington on the clear understanding that when their
marriage had settled down (a process they knew would not take long, and was
in fact more a humorous concession to popular wisdom than what was due to
themselves) they would buy a house and start a family.
.
To ROOM NINETEEN / 2545
And this is what happened. They lived in their charming flat for two years, giving parties and going to them, being a popular young married couple, and then Susan became pregnant, she gave up her job, and they bought a house in Richmond. It was typical of this couple that they had a son first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter. Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose. But people did feel these two had chosen; this balanced and sensible family was no more than what was due to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right.
And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in Richmond and were happy. They had everything they had wanted and had planned for.
And yet . . .
