To Room Nineteen

18/12/2025

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        Synopsising Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’, Rosemary Dinnage says Susan Rawlings is “an apparently normal and happily married woman who, when her children are finally at school, finds herself with free time and yet increasingly obsessed with a need for some area of unassailable privacy. First the school holidays come to seem unbearable, then even the school terms are no good because of her housekeeper’s chatter.” Susan decides to “put aside one room in the house to be self-consciously alone in, which soon gets taken over by the family; she goes on holiday alone but it is spoiled by having to phone the children every day. Secretly she takes a hotel room for part of each day, but the proprietress is soon plying her with tea and sympathy. Finally she finds a totally anonymous, sleazy room where she can spend the afternoons; but her husband, thinking she is having an affair, tracks her down. So she turns on the gas and is undisturbed at last.” (New York Review of Books) Is this simplification to the point of insult? Perhaps, especially when Dinnage also says: “One would imagine then that, like many novelists not of the first rank, she would distill her best work in short stories.” It is as though Dinnage couldn’t recall that Lessing’s The Grass is Singing had become a major work of postcolonial fiction, and The Golden Notebook synonymous with feminine emancipatory consciousness. Are these second-rank books? And who is in the first rank? Dinnage doesn’t say. We just know Lessing isn’t amongst the elect. 

            Let us not try to submerge ourselves in a body of work that is oceanically large and instead pay attention to that modest rivulet, 'To Room Nineteen'. Lessing lived long (until 94), and was hugely productive, writing numerous novels, novellas, short stories, plays, essays, memoirs, autobiographies, and even operettas, with music by Philip Glass. And then there were her books about cats. Even a devotee may feel reading half her work is more than enough. 'To Room Nineteen' is perhaps her most famous story and exemplifies many of her preoccupations: the woman who doesn’t quite know what to do with her life, has friends who don’t quite understand her, or feels she has no friends at all. Someone who can make a living but notes the pressure of family expectation and resists in various ways the conformity expected of her, even if this may lead to madness or death. If one accuses Dinnage of simplifying one story, aren’t we in danger of doing the same to Lessing’s work more generally by suggesting these are the preoccupations of a writer whose work we have acknowledged is vast, and just after promising to focus on 'To Room Nineteen' itself?

    However, anyone who knows Lessing’s work will see an ongoing interest in fracturing and fragility within robust prose, a style that can appear indifferent yet is capable of an unusually intense compassion. The story opens by offering us a statement: ''This is a story, I suppose, about a failure of intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence.” It continues as if narrated by a similar type of acumen as the narrator says that Susan and Matthew married later than their other friends, seemed to have chosen well, and lacked the disappointment that other people in their set were showing towards their loved ones. The Rawlings initially buy a flat together, as it would have been unfair to one or the other if they had shared one that belonged to the other party. In time, they move to a large house in Richmond, having first a boy, then a girl, and then twins - male and female. Their life is happy, and why shouldn’t it be? Susan has given up her job in advertising to look after the children, and Matthew is an editor on a paper he doesn’t read but which sounds respectable enough.  And yet…

     This and yet…might just be a feature of fiction, that storytelling inevitably demands a change in circumstances or why tell the story at all? But Lessing searches out within this peripeteia a transformation that is quite singular. A story about a family who allows the hair of a prophet into their home which transforms their lives (‘A Prophet’s Hair'), a man who finds as an adult the abundant imaginary freedoms of onanism ('Let Me Count the Times’), or a son coming back to Japan after a couple of years in the US (The Family Supper’) are all fine, modern British tales. Yet perhaps Lessing’s is the hardest to comprehend because the change of circumstance isn’t an external shift, and the sort of event that could change a story from one state to another is viewed by the narrator as merely a symptom of a greater problem that isn’t only internal but also inexplicable. True, some might see the catalytic event as Matthew’s affairs. There, Susan is at home with the children, unable to attend various parties, and Matthew goes alone and sometimes picks up a woman. However, this is what people would do in these increasingly promiscuous times, and though Susan “would sometimes be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness”, “she knew also that this bitterness was not in order, it was out of court.” Intelligent people in an intelligent marriage wouldn’t get worked up about such things. While in Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, the husband walks off with a younger woman, leaving the central character with the kids, the catalytic event is unequivocal, and the central character becomes chaotically confused.

Here, it seems more of an aside, and Matthew doesn’t leave. The marriage appears to matter and, as Nietzsche would say, “a marriage is proved good by its being able to tolerate an exception.” (Human All Too Human) 

    However, after Susan becomes increasingly alienated from her environment, irritated by the children, and finds “…resentment…poisoning her.” She also finds that she isn’t sure who she is. It was “as if the essential Susan were in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage.” She would notice herself shouting at the children as if a stranger to herself, and wonders, as the kids are now getting older, if she needs to get used to being on her own again. This could seem the inciting incident. She has far more time available than before, and she doesn’t know what to do with it and with herself. However, this doesn’t quite appear to be the case either, especially when she feels that there are still too many familial demands placed upon her. When she goes off on a walking holiday by herself in Wales, she speaks to the kids each morning before they go to school and, again, in the evening, talking to Matthew as well. During the day, she also speaks to the daily woman. “Susan prowled over wild country with the telephone wire holding her to her duty like a leash.”

           Such a remark can seem to justify Dinnage’s claim that the story is about a woman who wants little more than a bit of peace and quiet, a room of her own. But such an account ignores Lessing’s sense of inquiry and the story’s mystery. Lessing, as in other works, peppers the story with questions. Children? But children can’t be the centre of a life and a reason for being.” Matthew’s job?” “Their love for each other?” “Nor had he confessed? What sort of word is that?” What did she do in the room?” “But how to leave him because of a man…?” “So what did it matter if they felt dry, flat?” Alongside the questioning, there is the mystery, the sense that Susan becomes dislocated from herself, and the story is partly about trying to comprehend where she has gone. The narrator says one day Susan “found herself reluctant to enter her big and beautiful home because it was as if something was waiting for her there that she did not wish to confront.” A couple of pages later, we read: “in the dark she lay beside him [Matthew] feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away. She disliked very much this woman who lay here, cold and indifferent beside a suffering man, but she could not change her.” Here we have a woman who doesn’t only want a space to herself; she isn’t even sure she occupies her own body. 

      Earlier in the story, we are briefly in the first-person plural, even though 'To Room Nineteen' is generally in the third-person omniscient. Speaking about Matthew’s infidelity and her sense of self-worth, Susan reckons: “But if she [the lover] isn’t important, presumably it wasn’t important either when Matthew and I first went to bed with each other that morning whose delight even now…lays a long, wandlike finger over us…For me to care or, for that matter, not to care, is absurd….” In that old idiomatic phrase, Susan is no longer herself, but then who is she, and the importance of the story rests not just on Susan as an individual losing her bearings, but musing over what those bearings are for anybody. Psychologists might see disassociation (Susan alienated from her body when in bed with her husband), neurosis (anxiety and apprehension when she enters the house), schizophrenia (when Susan believes she definitely sees someone in the garden sitting on the white stone bench), and mythomania (she tells Matthew she has a lover named Michael Plant). They would wonder about Susan diagnostically. But instead, or at least also, we should think of Susan existentially. 

        This needn’t counter a pragmatic feminist reading close to Dinnage’s when she says: “Lessing explores to its logical limit a fantasy perhaps special to women about being free from any demands at all, from being battened on and sucked dry.” But escape doesn’t seem to be enough, and freedom increasingly looks like a chasm she is staring into rather than a vista she looks out upon, and cannot quite find because the family just won’t leave her alone. Albert Camus, who wrote a fine story about a woman caught in an inert middle-aged marriage in French Algeria, ‘The Adulterous Woman’, says in The Myth of Sisyphus, ''the absurd is the contrary of hope.” Does Susan start to become hopeless when she thinks about whether to care or not is absurd. “At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspects of their [people’s] gestures, their meaningless pantomime,” Camus says. It makes “…silly everything that surrounds us.” Silly may be too weak a work to describe Susan’s crisis. But when Camus adds the “incalculable tumble” to this pantomime, he could be close to describing what Susan is experiencing. It is as if she is searching through her life and her feelings, her domestic environment and her escape from it, a comprehension of this tumble, its incalculability, and can’t quite find it. The narrator cannot quite find it either, but all those question marks are part of the search, a vital dimension of the work as an enquiry. This doesn’t mean psychology can’t help, nor an understanding of a woman’s status at the time the story was written in 1963 (the year of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; the year Sylvia Plath took her life, like Susan, by turning on the gas). What it surely means though is that we cannot too confidently claim for it a significance from a given point of view without first entertaining the void out of which the story appears to be coming, To insist ‘To Room Nineteen’ is about a woman’s escape from her family isn’t erroneous but at the same time it doesn’t quite seem true either. It suggests a misplaced sense of assertion that sutures the wound the story has so insistently opened up. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

To Room Nineteen

        Synopsising Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’, Rosemary Dinnage says Susan Rawlings is “an apparently normal and happily married woman who, when her children are finally at school, finds herself with free time and yet increasingly obsessed with a need for some area of unassailable privacy. First the school holidays come to seem unbearable, then even the school terms are no good because of her housekeeper’s chatter.” Susan decides to “put aside one room in the house to be self-consciously alone in, which soon gets taken over by the family; she goes on holiday alone but it is spoiled by having to phone the children every day. Secretly she takes a hotel room for part of each day, but the proprietress is soon plying her with tea and sympathy. Finally she finds a totally anonymous, sleazy room where she can spend the afternoons; but her husband, thinking she is having an affair, tracks her down. So she turns on the gas and is undisturbed at last.” (New York Review of Books) Is this simplification to the point of insult? Perhaps, especially when Dinnage also says: “One would imagine then that, like many novelists not of the first rank, she would distill her best work in short stories.” It is as though Dinnage couldn’t recall that Lessing’s The Grass is Singing had become a major work of postcolonial fiction, and The Golden Notebook synonymous with feminine emancipatory consciousness. Are these second-rank books? And who is in the first rank? Dinnage doesn’t say. We just know Lessing isn’t amongst the elect. 

            Let us not try to submerge ourselves in a body of work that is oceanically large and instead pay attention to that modest rivulet, 'To Room Nineteen'. Lessing lived long (until 94), and was hugely productive, writing numerous novels, novellas, short stories, plays, essays, memoirs, autobiographies, and even operettas, with music by Philip Glass. And then there were her books about cats. Even a devotee may feel reading half her work is more than enough. 'To Room Nineteen' is perhaps her most famous story and exemplifies many of her preoccupations: the woman who doesn’t quite know what to do with her life, has friends who don’t quite understand her, or feels she has no friends at all. Someone who can make a living but notes the pressure of family expectation and resists in various ways the conformity expected of her, even if this may lead to madness or death. If one accuses Dinnage of simplifying one story, aren’t we in danger of doing the same to Lessing’s work more generally by suggesting these are the preoccupations of a writer whose work we have acknowledged is vast, and just after promising to focus on 'To Room Nineteen' itself?

    However, anyone who knows Lessing’s work will see an ongoing interest in fracturing and fragility within robust prose, a style that can appear indifferent yet is capable of an unusually intense compassion. The story opens by offering us a statement: ''This is a story, I suppose, about a failure of intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence.” It continues as if narrated by a similar type of acumen as the narrator says that Susan and Matthew married later than their other friends, seemed to have chosen well, and lacked the disappointment that other people in their set were showing towards their loved ones. The Rawlings initially buy a flat together, as it would have been unfair to one or the other if they had shared one that belonged to the other party. In time, they move to a large house in Richmond, having first a boy, then a girl, and then twins - male and female. Their life is happy, and why shouldn’t it be? Susan has given up her job in advertising to look after the children, and Matthew is an editor on a paper he doesn’t read but which sounds respectable enough.  And yet…

     This and yet…might just be a feature of fiction, that storytelling inevitably demands a change in circumstances or why tell the story at all? But Lessing searches out within this peripeteia a transformation that is quite singular. A story about a family who allows the hair of a prophet into their home which transforms their lives (‘A Prophet’s Hair'), a man who finds as an adult the abundant imaginary freedoms of onanism ('Let Me Count the Times’), or a son coming back to Japan after a couple of years in the US (The Family Supper’) are all fine, modern British tales. Yet perhaps Lessing’s is the hardest to comprehend because the change of circumstance isn’t an external shift, and the sort of event that could change a story from one state to another is viewed by the narrator as merely a symptom of a greater problem that isn’t only internal but also inexplicable. True, some might see the catalytic event as Matthew’s affairs. There, Susan is at home with the children, unable to attend various parties, and Matthew goes alone and sometimes picks up a woman. However, this is what people would do in these increasingly promiscuous times, and though Susan “would sometimes be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness”, “she knew also that this bitterness was not in order, it was out of court.” Intelligent people in an intelligent marriage wouldn’t get worked up about such things. While in Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, the husband walks off with a younger woman, leaving the central character with the kids, the catalytic event is unequivocal, and the central character becomes chaotically confused.

Here, it seems more of an aside, and Matthew doesn’t leave. The marriage appears to matter and, as Nietzsche would say, “a marriage is proved good by its being able to tolerate an exception.” (Human All Too Human) 

    However, after Susan becomes increasingly alienated from her environment, irritated by the children, and finds “…resentment…poisoning her.” She also finds that she isn’t sure who she is. It was “as if the essential Susan were in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage.” She would notice herself shouting at the children as if a stranger to herself, and wonders, as the kids are now getting older, if she needs to get used to being on her own again. This could seem the inciting incident. She has far more time available than before, and she doesn’t know what to do with it and with herself. However, this doesn’t quite appear to be the case either, especially when she feels that there are still too many familial demands placed upon her. When she goes off on a walking holiday by herself in Wales, she speaks to the kids each morning before they go to school and, again, in the evening, talking to Matthew as well. During the day, she also speaks to the daily woman. “Susan prowled over wild country with the telephone wire holding her to her duty like a leash.”

           Such a remark can seem to justify Dinnage’s claim that the story is about a woman who wants little more than a bit of peace and quiet, a room of her own. But such an account ignores Lessing’s sense of inquiry and the story’s mystery. Lessing, as in other works, peppers the story with questions. Children? But children can’t be the centre of a life and a reason for being.” Matthew’s job?” “Their love for each other?” “Nor had he confessed? What sort of word is that?” What did she do in the room?” “But how to leave him because of a man…?” “So what did it matter if they felt dry, flat?” Alongside the questioning, there is the mystery, the sense that Susan becomes dislocated from herself, and the story is partly about trying to comprehend where she has gone. The narrator says one day Susan “found herself reluctant to enter her big and beautiful home because it was as if something was waiting for her there that she did not wish to confront.” A couple of pages later, we read: “in the dark she lay beside him [Matthew] feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away. She disliked very much this woman who lay here, cold and indifferent beside a suffering man, but she could not change her.” Here we have a woman who doesn’t only want a space to herself; she isn’t even sure she occupies her own body. 

      Earlier in the story, we are briefly in the first-person plural, even though 'To Room Nineteen' is generally in the third-person omniscient. Speaking about Matthew’s infidelity and her sense of self-worth, Susan reckons: “But if she [the lover] isn’t important, presumably it wasn’t important either when Matthew and I first went to bed with each other that morning whose delight even now…lays a long, wandlike finger over us…For me to care or, for that matter, not to care, is absurd….” In that old idiomatic phrase, Susan is no longer herself, but then who is she, and the importance of the story rests not just on Susan as an individual losing her bearings, but musing over what those bearings are for anybody. Psychologists might see disassociation (Susan alienated from her body when in bed with her husband), neurosis (anxiety and apprehension when she enters the house), schizophrenia (when Susan believes she definitely sees someone in the garden sitting on the white stone bench), and mythomania (she tells Matthew she has a lover named Michael Plant). They would wonder about Susan diagnostically. But instead, or at least also, we should think of Susan existentially. 

        This needn’t counter a pragmatic feminist reading close to Dinnage’s when she says: “Lessing explores to its logical limit a fantasy perhaps special to women about being free from any demands at all, from being battened on and sucked dry.” But escape doesn’t seem to be enough, and freedom increasingly looks like a chasm she is staring into rather than a vista she looks out upon, and cannot quite find because the family just won’t leave her alone. Albert Camus, who wrote a fine story about a woman caught in an inert middle-aged marriage in French Algeria, ‘The Adulterous Woman’, says in The Myth of Sisyphus, ''the absurd is the contrary of hope.” Does Susan start to become hopeless when she thinks about whether to care or not is absurd. “At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspects of their [people’s] gestures, their meaningless pantomime,” Camus says. It makes “…silly everything that surrounds us.” Silly may be too weak a work to describe Susan’s crisis. But when Camus adds the “incalculable tumble” to this pantomime, he could be close to describing what Susan is experiencing. It is as if she is searching through her life and her feelings, her domestic environment and her escape from it, a comprehension of this tumble, its incalculability, and can’t quite find it. The narrator cannot quite find it either, but all those question marks are part of the search, a vital dimension of the work as an enquiry. This doesn’t mean psychology can’t help, nor an understanding of a woman’s status at the time the story was written in 1963 (the year of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; the year Sylvia Plath took her life, like Susan, by turning on the gas). What it surely means though is that we cannot too confidently claim for it a significance from a given point of view without first entertaining the void out of which the story appears to be coming, To insist ‘To Room Nineteen’ is about a woman’s escape from her family isn’t erroneous but at the same time it doesn’t quite seem true either. It suggests a misplaced sense of assertion that sutures the wound the story has so insistently opened up. 


© Tony McKibbin