In Pursuit of the English

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.

From the book jacket (1960)

In Pursuit of the English is the story of a part of Mrs Lessing’s life, opening with her departure from South Africa and embodying her first crucial years in England. It is an account characterized by a revealing eye and a balance of humour and humanity. Some of the English, she learned from living in a London working-class home, are lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous and full-blooded; in fact, quite unlike what they are supposed to be.

About the Author

Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time. She lives in north London.