To Room Nineteen Study Guide

Doris Lessing was born in Iran to British parents. As a young child, her family moved to what is now modern-day Zimbabwe, where she lived until her move to Salisbury in 1937. She met her first husband in Salisbury, with whom she had two children. In 1943, when their marriage ended, Lessing left their children and her ex-husband. She married her second husband that same year. They had one child together before divorcing in 1949. Upon their divorce, Lessing took her youngest child and moved to London with him. There, she pursued political activism (as an avid Marxist and an anti-apartheid activist) as well as continued her burgeoning literary career. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. In 1962, she published The Golden Notebook, which brought her international attention. To bring attention to the hardships for new authors trying to get their work published, she wrote two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers in 1982: The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon her death in 2013, she was recognized as a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

Lessing was deeply influenced by the counterculture movements of the 1950s and 60s. She was heavily involved in the anti-apartheid movement and drew inspiration from Marxist theory, although she eventually became disillusioned with the latter. This interest in the political systems and imbalances of power in Western society led her to consider the patriarchal systems that governed her own life, which led her to abandon her first husband and two children in pursuit of freedom in London. Elements of rebelling against societal systems and expectations can be seen throughout Susan’s inner struggle in “To Room Nineteen.” Additionally, in the 1960s, the second wave of feminism (largely sparked by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique) gained traction. This political movement focused largely on systemic issues that followed women both in the workplace and the domestic sphere. Works like Friedan’s can be seen as directly related to “To Room Nineteen”: like The Feminine Mystique, Lessing’s story focuses on the internal lives of women as they navigate the rigid expectations of the domestic sphere. 

Many of Doris Lessing’s works explore the trappings of femininity and motherhood. The Golden Notebook, her first novel, follows writer Anna Wulf across the Cold War era. Additionally, “To Room Nineteen” appears as part of short story collection, A Man and Two Women, which has many stories about marital discontent and psychological turmoil, including the titular story, “A Man and Two Women,” about the breakdown of a marriage shortly after the birth of their first child. Similar themes of womanhood and insanity are mirrored across time periods in other short stories like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Lessing’s work, however, is directly reflective of the second wave of feminism that occurred in the 1960s: as such, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, about the disillusionment of full-time homemakers, is another seminal text for this short story.