SOURCE: Pickering, Jean. “The Grass Is Singing 1950): African Stories (1964).” In Understanding Doris Lessing, pp. 18-37. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Pickering explores the related themes of the stories in African Stories and her novel The Grass Is Singing.

The Grass Is Singing was written before Lessing left Rhodesia and published the year after she emigrated to England, where she wrote most of the stories later collected as African Stories. The interrelatedness of her work, so evident later in her career, was apparent even at this early period. The relations between the individual and the collective (by which Lessing means both institutions, like marriage or the educational system, and groups one elects to join, like a sports club or the Communist Party), between black and white, between men and women, between the settler and the land, between role and identity, and between the Freudian...