Martha Quest is set in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, where Lessing lived from 1925 until 1949.[2] At the beginning of the novel Martha is fifteen years old, "living on an impoverished African farm with her parents; a girl of passionate vitality, avid for experience and for self-knowledge, bitterly resentful of the conventional narrowness of her home life". She then becomes a typist in the provincial capital where "she begins to encounter the real life she is so eager to experience and understand."[3] Lessing's first novel The Grass Is Singing published in 1950, also takes place in Southern Rhodesia, and, set during the 1940s, deals with the racial politics between the British settlers and Africans in that country.
Novelist C. P. Snow, in a review of Martha Quest for The Sunday Times, described Lessing as "one of the most powerfully equipped young novelists now writing."[4]
Autobiographical novel
Martha Quest, like much of Lessing's fiction, is autobiographical. In it she draws "upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns", which "emerge out of her experiences in Africa", and Martha Quest, like other of Lessing's works set in Africa, that were "published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa". In 1956, Lessing's courageous outspokenness led her to being declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.[5]
