The Children of Violence is a sequence of five semi-autobiographical novels by British

Nobel Prize in Literature ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , caption = , awarded_for = Outstanding contributions in literature , presenter = Swedish Academy , holder = Annie Ernaux (2022) , location = Stockholm, Sweden , year = 1901 , ...

-winner

Doris Lessing Doris May Lessing (; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remain ...

: '' Martha Quest'' (1952), '' A Proper Marriage'' (1954), '' A Ripple from the Storm'' (1958), ''

Landlocked A landlocked country is a country that does not have territory connected to an ocean or whose coastlines lie on endorheic basins. There are currently 44 landlocked countries and 4 landlocked de facto states. Kazakhstan is the world's largest ...

'' (1965), and '' The Four-Gated City'' (1969).Fro
the dust jacket of the first edition
of ''The Four-Gated City''. The novels "are strongly influenced by Lessing's rejection of a domestic family role and her involvement with communism." Lessing identifies the sequence as a '' Bildungsroman''. The series follows the life of protagonist Martha Quest from adolescence until her death, which takes place in the future, in the year 1997. The first four novels are set during the 1930s and 1940s, in the fictional country of Zambesia, based on the former

British colony The British Overseas Territories (BOTs), also known as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs), are fourteen territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom. They are the last remnants of the former Bri ...

of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where Lessing lived from 1925 until 1949.DorisLessing.org
/ref> The fifth work, ''The Four-Gated City'', is set in London, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s. The novel's appendix extends into a

dystopian A dystopia (from Ancient Greek δυσ- "bad, hard" and τόπος "place"; alternatively cacotopiaCacotopia (from κακός ''kakos'' "bad") was the term used by Jeremy Bentham in his 1818 Plan of Parliamentary Reform (Works, vol. 3, p. 493). ...

future in which Britain has become uninhabitable due to an unspecified catastrophe, speculated to be either a nuclear detonation or mass contamination from chemical weapons following a fire at Porton Down.

References

Novels by Doris Lessing Novel series 20th-century British novels {{autobio-novel-stub