SOURCE: Nordius, Janina. “Lessing's ‘To Room Nineteen’.” The Explicator 57, no. 3 (spring 1999): 171-73.

In the following essay, Nordius regards T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as an important subtext in “To Room Nineteen.”

In her illuminating discussion of Doris Lessing's debt to T. S. Eliot, Claire Sprague traces allusions to The Waste Land and other poems in four of Lessing's novels.¹ In addition to those instances, The Waste Land is also an important subtext in Lessing's short story “To Room Nineteen.” Charting the failure of communication and subsequent decline of love in a mid-twentieth-century marriage, Lessing both pursues one of Eliot's most central themes in The Waste Land and writes back from the woman's point of view.

“To Room Nineteen” addresses Eliot's tableau in part 2 of The Waste Land that features a woman sitting before a mirror, brushing her hair:

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread...