Browsing by Author "Hunter, Eva Shireen"

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    The mother-daughter conflict in selected works by Doris Lessing
    (1985) Hunter, Eva Shireen; Cartwright, John
    The central characters in Doris Lessing's novels are usually women struggling to shape for themselves a new and authentic identity in a changing world. In this study it is argued that this quest involves the Lessing character in a conflict less with any man than with another woman. This woman is the mother. The younger woman's task is to resist the compulsion to become like her mother and so lead a narrow, entirely domesticated life. The theme of the mother-daughter conflict is given its first extensive examination in this study. Three of Lessing's works are analysed in detail, while brief reference is made to nearly all of her novels and some African short stories. The three works selected, The Grass is Singing (1950), "To Room Nineteen" (1963), and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), mark the beginning, an approximate mid-point, and the conclusion of the theme under discussion. They are also works that have not, as yet, enjoyed the exhaustive critical attention given to the Children of Violence series and The Golden Notebook.
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    A sense of place in selected African works by Doris Lessing read in conjunction with novels of education by contemporary white South African women writers
    (1990) Hunter, Eva Shireen; Haresnape, Geoffrey
    This study provides a more intensive reading of certain works by Doris Lessing set in Southern Africa than has yet been attempted, and reads them,• for the first time, in conjunction with a particular literary lineage within Southern African letters, the novel of education by white women. The works by Lessing chosen for discussion are: two short stories, "The Old Chief Mshlanga" (1951) and "Sunrise on the Veld" (1951), the first two volumes of the Children of Violence series, Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954), and Lessing's autobiographical account of a return visit to Rhodesia in 1956, Going Home (1957). Those by the other Southern African women writers--all of which, with the exception of Gordimer's The Lying Days have received virtually no critical attention to date--are: Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953)', Jillian Becker's The Virgins• (1976), Carolyn Slaughter's Dreams of the Kalahari (1981), Lynn Freed's Home Ground (1986), E.M. / MacPhail's Phoebe and Nio (1987), and Menan du Plessis's A State of Fear (1983).