In addition Mary had given up her job and simply couldn’t get a “city” job any longer. This was a time when marriage was a strong institution and one didn’t easily turn back. Their married life is a difficult one and soon they both know it is rather loveless, but they are stuck. Her husband and neighbors treat their black workers very poorly and harshly, but nonetheless, are often somewhat friendly with them.
THE GRASS IS SINGING BOOK FULL
She decides it would be best for her to marry, and in a strange and very quick set of events she meets a very poor farmer, Dick Turner, and in a short and whirlwind courtship (I hesitate to say love affair), she marries Dick and moves to his remote and very poor farm.Īll the whites look down upon the blacks and don’t see them a full human beings in the slightest, but, for reasons we simply don’t know, Mary is even more extreme in her racism that most of the others. She does not go out much with men, does spend lots of time at the movies, and lives a quiet and fairly uneventful, but comfortable life.Īfter arriving at 30 years old, and being seen by others as an old maid, she begins to wonder about her future. She’s quite a loner, lives in a rooming home for young women, but has become the oldest of those living there, sort of an older sister to the younger women. Mary has been living in the city, working as a secretary and is modestly successful. It is South Africa (seemingly today’s Rhodesia) and the time, while not given, must be sometime in the 1940s, perhaps as late as 1950. The novel is the backstory of how this all came about. Thus the ending of the novel is given in just a couple of pages at the outset.
The novel opens with an anonymous newspaper announcement that Mary Turner died, having been murdered by her black servant.
Book review - By Doris Lessing – THE GRASS IS SINGING Reviews of Nobel Prize winner