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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What did Lessing do while she spent her days with John?

2. What method of birth control had Lessing been using?

3. What was Lessing's wage when she worked as a junior typist?

4. What aspect of her childhood determined that Lessing would never separate herself from politics?

5. What does Lessing mention as the one thing that would have stopped her from marrying Frank?

Short Essay Questions

1. What did Lessing realize when she was diagnosed with Low Fever and sent to the mountains to recover?

2. What rationale did Lessing give for her marriage to Gottfried Lessing in Chapter 14?

3. How did Lessing support herself when she no longer lived with her parents?

4. What did Lessing believe to be the true cause of her father's death?

5. Describe the letter Lessing received from her mother in Chapter 9.

6. Describe the beginning of Lessing's relationship with Gottfried.

7. What became of the three husbands who enlisted to fight Hitler?

8. Describe Lessing's activities in Capetown in Chapter 17.

9. Ultimately, why did Lessing think that she and Gottfried were mismatched?

10. Describe Lessing's entrance into love and romance as she describes it in Chapter 10.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss Lessing's perspective on social and political activism. How did Lessing connect theory and praxis? Were the people whom she associated with isolated intellectuals or were they activists for a particular cause? How did Lessing portray activist causes throughout her autobiography? What did she advocate?

Essay Topic 2

In a memoir that spans three continents over the course of the author's life, space and place become particularly significant to the story and to Lessing's overall commentary. Examine the way in which she treats various spaces and places in the text. What themes, messages, or ideas does Lessing develop through her treatment of spaces and places? How does she portray those spaces and places? Be sure to consider limited spaces such as the various houses that Lessing recalls, and places as broad as the countries she lived in, to the various cities or communities where she resided.

Essay Topic 3

Growing up in two distinct regions of the British Empire, Lessing received a very intimate portrait of race relations in the British territories before the dissolution of the Empire. Analyze the way in which Lessing approached race and race relations in her autobiography. How did she define the term, race, among the people living in Persia and Southern Rhodesia at that time? How did the different races interact in Southern Rhodesia? How did Lessing's understanding of race compare or contrast with the opinions of those around her?

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