Chapter Eleven Summary and Analysis

In Chapter Eleven, while working at the telephone exchange, Lessing comes into contact with Dorothy Schwartz, who asks her to join a Left Book Club. Her first encounter with the local communists does not impress her. Lessing begins smoking and drinking and is asked out often. She exults in her physical strength and beauty, loves music and dancing. Lessing speaks of being young and cruel and beautiful, and of how older women view the younger ones. After years of telling her family she would never marry or have children, Lessing marries Frank Wisdom. She says she was not in love with him, or him with her. She is pregnant, but does not know it when she marries him. Lessing feels that "Tigger", her outward personality, is the one that marries Wisdom. They take an apartment in town, and at...