In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary

By Doris Lessing

Book Overview

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 brilliantpiece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060976292
• ISBN13: 9780060976293
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

warm working-class reception...or something

This little book is a gem in every way. Lessing's loving account of how she got along when she first came to London/England is warm, witty, funny and written with an admirable insight into the minds of people she met. It is never less than very good, and it digs deeply into "the English character", if there is such a thing...