In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [111]
‘She has to go some time, it stands to reason. The way I look at it, some people have an itch in their feet, that moves them on from place to place.’
‘I don’t blame you, dear,’ said Flo to me. ‘But we’ve been good to you, haven’t we, darling?’
‘You make me sick,’ said Rose. ‘Do you want her to say sweet things, and all this time Dan’s as good as killing her because she has the sense to say no to your fancy rent?’
‘But I don’t understand these things, you know that, dear.’
‘Yes?’ said Rose.
‘But we have been good to your little boy, haven’t we, darling?’
‘Very,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forget it.’
‘That’s right. We should all be kind to each other. If we was all kind to each other all over the world it would be different, wouldn’t it now?’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘A likely story.’
Winner of the Nobel Prize
NONFICTION
AFRICAN LAUGHTER: Four Visits to Zimbabwe
ISBN 978-0-06-092433-1 (paperback)
GOING HOME
ISBN 978-0-06-09730-9 (paperback)
IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH: A Documentary
ISBN 978-0-06-097629-3 (paperback)
PRISONS WE CHOOSE TO LIVE INSIDE
ISBN 978-0-06-039077-8 (paperback)
TIME BITES: Views and Reviews
ISBN 978-0-06-083141-7 (paperback)
UNDER MY SKIN: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
ISBN 978-0-06-092664-9 (paperback)
WALKING IN THE SHADE: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962
ISBN 978-0-06-092956-5 (paperback)
FICTION
BEN, IN THE WORLD: The Sequel to The Fifth Child
ISBN 978-0-06-093465-1 (paperback)
THE CLEFT: A Novel
ISBN 978-0-06-083486-9 (hardcover)
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
ISBN 978-0-06-093140-7 (paperback)
THE GRANDMOTHERS: Four Short Novels
ISBN 978-0-06-053011-2 (paperback)
THE GRASS IS SINGING: A Novel
ISBN 978-0-06-095346-1 (paperback)
LOVE AGAIN: A Novel
ISBN 978-0-06-092796-7 (paperback)
MARA AND DANN: An Adventure
ISBN 978-0-06-093056-1 (paperback)
THE REAL THING: Stories and Sketches
ISBN 978-0-06-092417-1 (paperback)
THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA’S DAUGHTER, GRIOT AND THE SNOW DOG: A Novel
ISBN 978-0-06-053013-6 (paperback)
THE SWEETEST DREAM: A Novel
ISBN 978-0-06-093755-3 (paperback)
THE CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE SERIES
MARTHA QUEST
ISBN 978-0-06-095969-2 (paperback)
A PROPER MARRIAGE
ISBN 978-0-06-097663-7 (paperback)
A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM
ISBN 978-0-06-097664-4 (paperback)
LANDLOCKED
ISBN 978-0-06-097665-1 (paperback)
THE FOUR-GATED CITY
ISBN 978-0-06-097667-5 (paperback)
HARPER PERENNIAL
About the Author
DOMS LESSING was bom of British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems and plays. Doris Lessing lives in London.
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Praise
“One of the most authentic books ever written about the English…. Funny, touching and so real that the smell and taste of London seem to rise from its pages.”
—R.A. Fraser, San Francisco Chronicle
In Pursuit of the English is a novelist’s account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you’ve probably never met or even read about—though they are the real English. The cast of characters—if that term can be applied to real people—includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. Skeffington, a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest, a prostitute, who replies to Lessing’s question “Don’t you ever like sex?” with “If you’re going to talk dirty, I’m not interested.”
In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliant piece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.
“Eloquent