The Grass is Singing dramatizes the racial tensions between British colonialists and African natives in Southern Rhodesia by telling the story of a troubled sort of love triangle between the perennially unsuccessful small farmer Dick Turner, his intelligent but repressed wife Mary, and their native houseboy Moses. As she despairs in Dick and his attempts to improve their farm, Mary finds herself falling under the power of Moses. In the end, Moses murders her, and Dick Turner goes insane over being forced off of his farm by a more successful neighboring farmer.
Doris Lessing published the novel, her first, in 1950, depicting the Southern Rhodesian society she knew intimately as it was in...
