In search of the 'resting point' that she names in 'The Small Personal Voice' (1957), Doris Lessing also responds to the restlessness of her times as she explores a myriad of individual and communal dislocations in her writing. Through readings of novels from The Grass Is Singing (1950) to The Fifth Child (1988), Margaret Rowe maps many of the literary and cultural negotiations that make Doris Lessing both a maverick and a mainstream novelist.

Examining the pull of paternal and maternal biographical and literary identifications in Lessing, Rowe relates those identifications to the tensions between the ordinary and the visionary in Lessing's fiction.