What he does not know is that the weal on Moses' face is there because Mary, enraged at what she considered insolence, struck him with a whip. They have difficulty keeping a servant until Dick assigns his best field hand, Moses, to the house. Black people have never been part of Mary's world, and she treats them with frigid contempt. The natives, whom Dick employs on the farm, are a further source of tension. The Turners' barren existence is contrasted with the fierce beauty of the land, to which they are oblivious. Their white neighbors make overtures of friendship, but, out of shame at her poverty, Mary rejects them.

When Mary becomes involved in the running of the farm, she realizes that its failure is not down to bad luck, as Dick keeps telling her, but his incompetence.

From the beginning, they are distant and cold, but, except when Mary briefly runs away, fear of loneliness and lack of money keep them together. Dick is also in a hurry to wed, because he is very lonely and unhappy clawing a bare living from a subsistence farm and living in a bare, ugly little house. But, after overhearing her friends laugh at her as sexless and immature, she resolves to marry, and when Dick Turner asks her she consents, though she has met him only twice. The bulk of the novel is the story of Mary's life.Īfter a loveless, wretched childhood, Mary is contented with her life as an office worker in a city in Rhodesia. The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed by her black servant, Moses.

The novel created a sensation when it was first published and became an instant success in Europe and the United States. It takes place in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in southern Africa, during the 1940s and deals with the racial politics between whites and blacks in that country (which was then a British Colony). The Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by the British author Doris Lessing.

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