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    A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child"
    A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child"
    A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child"
    Ebook37 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535836555
    A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child"

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      A Study Guide for Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child" - Gale

      12

      The Fifth Child

      Doris Lessing

      1988

      Introduction

      The Fifth Child, published in 1988, is a short novel by Doris Lessing, one of the most noted twentieth-century British authors. Set in England from the 1960s to the 1980s, The Fifth Child tells the story of a middle-class couple, David and Harriet Lovatt, who create an idyllic family life with their four children in a large Victorian house not far from London. Relatives come and stay during vacations, and there are long family parties. But the pleasant times fade with the arrival of Ben, the couple's fifth child. Ben is a strange, aggressive child who seems to the Lovatt family to be more alien than human. As they try to deal with him, their previously happy family life unravels. Harriet feels that the family blames her for what has happened, and Ben seems to have no future. As he reaches adolescence, he has learned nothing at school and fits in only with a crowd of soon-to-be dropouts who engage in petty crime.

      Some critics saw the novel as a comment on British society in the 1980s, although Lessing said this was not her intention. Rather, she wanted to explore what might happen if some prehistoric, prehuman race was still somewhere present in the human gene pool and became incarnated in human form in a modern society. As she explored this idea, she produced a thought-provoking novel that deals with issues relating to the nature of the family and the role of women in family life, especially the notion of how to balance personal responsibility with the freedom to pursue personal and familial happiness.

      Author Biography

      Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (present-day Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both her parents were British. In 1925, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, which was then a British colony. Her father became a maize (corn) farmer. Doris was sent to a convent school and later a high school in Salisbury, the capital city. However, she dropped out of that school when she was thirteen and received no more formal education. She was, however, a voracious

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