The Four-Gated City

The Four-Gated City, published in 1969, is the concluding novel in British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing's five-volume, semi-autobiographical series The Children of Violence, which she began, in 1952, with Martha Quest. The series Children of Violence follows the life of protagonist Martha Quest, from age fifteen in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, through adolescence and a marriage shaped by the Second World War. In The Four-Gated City Lessing moves the setting from Zambezia, a fictionalized version of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, to London, and this novel has a science fiction, dystopian ending, with Martha dying in 1997. When published it created a stir with claims that it promoted communism. The Four-Gated City is one of Lessing's most important works. Lessing had moved to London, from southern Africa, with her son Peter in 1949, after divorcing her second husband Gottfried Lessing.