But common to all her novels is her use of the marginal perspective of the outsider--a position corresponding to her own relationship, both as an ex-colonial and as a woman, to contemporary Western culture."
Lessing's wide-ranging literary appetite is one of the defining characteristics of her work; another is her style. "The Lessing sentence is blunt," explained Philip Hensher in the Spectator, "quickly veering from concrete facts to abstract nouns, tempted briefly by the possibilities of rhapsody, but always turning back to the urgency of the urban demotic. . . . Its cadences are punchy. . . . she loves the grand, dramatic force of words like wisdom, and the vivid simplicity of the names of colours." "Critics have found it extremely hard to categorize Lessing," observed Fiona R. Barnes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "for she has at various stages of her life espoused different causes and been labeled over again."
Years in Africa
In 1924 Lessing's father took the family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), hoping to make a fortune growing corn and tobacco and panning for gold. The family found little fortune on its new farm, located in a remote corner of the Rhodesian bush not far from the border with Mozambique.
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