29 pages 58 minutes read

Doris Lessing

To Room Nineteen

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1958

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Character Analysis

Susan Rawlings

At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes Susan in almost completely conventional terms—and almost completely as others see her. Susan and Matthew are well-matched, their friends believe, “[B]y virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others come for advice” (2544). She has an appropriate education and a well-paying job at an advertising firm, which she willingly relinquishes in order to raise their children. She is a dutiful wife—even when Matthew engages in extramarital dalliances, she does not, and she attempts to forgive him for his transgressions—and a sensible, caring mother.

However, the story also depicts Susan, from the beginning, as a protagonist on a quest for meaning: She wonders what the point of her very existence is, and especially whether she has meaning beyond her roles as mother, wife, and member of a particular social class. She yearns for solitude, for creative retreat, and for access to privacy and her own space; these desires conflict with her prescribed domestic roles and cause irreconcilable tension in her marriage. She is haunted by a feeling of emptiness and an indefinable restlessness that she personifies as demons, lacking other language to articulate her dissatisfaction with female gender roles.

Related Titles

By Doris Lessing

Study Guide

logo

A Woman on a Roof

Doris Lessing

A Woman on a Roof

Doris Lessing

Plot Summary

logo

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Doris Lessing

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Doris Lessing

Plot Summary

logo

Martha Quest

Doris Lessing

Martha Quest

Doris Lessing

Study Guide

logo

No Witchcraft for Sale

Doris Lessing

No Witchcraft for Sale

Doris Lessing

Plot Summary

logo

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Doris Lessing

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Doris Lessing

Plot Summary

logo

The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing

The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing

Study Guide

logo

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing

Study Guide

logo

The Grass is Singing

Doris Lessing

The Grass is Singing

Doris Lessing

Study Guide

logo

Through the Tunnel

Doris Lessing

Through the Tunnel

Doris Lessing