In Pursuit of the English
By (Author) Doris Lessing
HarperCollins Publishers
Flamingo
30th June 1993
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000
823.914
Paperback
224
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 15mm
167g
By turns, an unsparing and joyous account of life in a postwar London rooming house by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.
In the early post-war years, Doris Lessing left her native Southern Africa in search of a grail a life of glamour and refinement that she naively believed England offered everyone. A fascinating, hilarious memoir of her first impressions of her adopted country, In Pursuit of the English' brilliantly captures Lessings constant wonder at and growing affection for the people she came to know: the working-class of the East End of London. Lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous and full-blooded, they were quite unlike the English she had expected to find
Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.