The narrator of In Pursuit of the English brings a postcolonial, hybrid and feminist standpoint to her “ethnography” of the Notting Hill district of London in this semi-autobiographical account of Lessing's arrival in London from Rhodesia in 1949. “Doris”, as the narrator is known, says she is pursuing two “grails”: “England” and “the Working-Class”, but she has to give up both universalist concepts of England as an “imagined community” and the socialist cosmopolitanism of an undifferentiated working class. She instead discovers the local cosmopolitanism of the neighbourhood of Notting Hill and learns from her female friends how to centre herself in one district and navigate paths through the city. As she travels through the district of Notting Hill, she brings her experience of Africa into her observations of her new space and uses that hybrid and feminist vision to map the neighbourhood and create a snapshot of a culture of London in the 1940s and 1950s.
Jed Esty, A. ShrinkingIsland: Modernism and National Culture in England, Princeton : Princeton UP, 2004, p. 212.
2.
Akil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond `Culture': Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference", Cultural Anthropology, 7, 1 (1992), 7.
3.
James Clifford, "Traveling Cultures", in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 104.
4.
Doris Lessing, In Pursuit of the English, 1960; New York: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 2. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.
5.
Judith Kegan Gardiner, Rhys, Stead, Lessing and the Politics of Empathy, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998, p. 13.
6.
Anthony Chennells and Debrah Raschke, "Doris Lessing and the Spirit of Postcolonialism: Zimbabwe to Star Wars", Doris Lessing Studies, 21, 2 (2001), 3.
7.
Homi Bhabha, "Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt", in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler , New York: Routledge, p. 56.
8.
Claire Sprague says that the London setting is first "fully realized in . . . In Pursuit of the English", Sprague , Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, p. 38.
9.
See Christine Wick Sizemore, Negotiating Identities in Women's Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002 , pp. 2-9, for a discussion of the intersections of postcolonialism and feminism.
10.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 168.
11.
Philip Holden , "The Colony and the City: London, Heterotopias, and Common Histories", New Literature Review, 39 (2003), 111.
12.
Jane M.Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 6.
13.
John Clement Ball, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, p. 33.
14.
Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, New York: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 4. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.
15.
Doris Lessing , The Four-Gated City, New York: Knopf, 1969, p. 22.
16.
Ian Baucom , Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Location of Identity, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999, p. 16. John McLeod also builds his analysis of Lessing's critique of national identity in In Pursuit of the English on Baucom's discussion of blood versus place as a model of national identity, McLeod , Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis , New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 77-8.
17.
Doris Lessing , A Small Personal Voice, ed. Paul Schlueter, New York: Knopf, 1979, p. 74.
18.
Rhys, Stead, Lessing, p. 84.
19.
Susan Yelin, From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer , Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998, p. 60.
20.
Postcolonial London, p. 79.
21.
Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983, rev. edn. London: Verso, 1991, p. 7.
22.
Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp. 22-8.
23.
Bruce Robbins summarizes the various terms that have been used for local cosmopolitanism, including David Hollinger's and Mitchell Cohen's term "rooted cosmopolitanism", Benita Parry's term "postcolonial cosmopolitanism" and Homi Bhabha's term "vernacular cosmopolitanism", Cosmopolitics, p. 1. Pheng Cheah contrasts James Clifford's "discrepant cosmopolitanisms" with philosophical uses of the term, Cosmopolitics, p. 21. They are all differentiated from what Rob Wilson and others refer to as a "romantic localism", an idealization of place as "the foundational basis of social solidarity, horizontal fraternity, and primary loyalty", Cosmopolitics, p. 358.
24.
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia UP, 2005, p. 67.
25.
From the Margins of Empire, p. 69.
26.
Postcolonial London, p. 81.
27.
Rob Shields , "A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory", in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis, ed. Anthony King, New York: New York UP, 1996, p. 236.
28.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960, pp. 47-8.
29.
Christine Wick Sizemore, A Female Vision of the City: London in the Novels of Five British Women, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989, pp. 11-13.
30.
"Traveling Cultures", p. 101.
31.
David Seamon, "Newcomers, Existential Outsiders and Insiders: Their Portrayal in Two Books by Doris Lessing", in Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place, ed. Douglas C.D. Pocock, London: Croom Helm , 1981, p. 96.
32.
Postcolonial London, p. 80.
33.
"The Colony and the City", 110-11.
34.
The Four-Gated City, p. 10. For an analysis of the image of the city in both The Four-Gated City and The Diaries of Jane Somers, see A Female Vision of the City: London in the Novels of Five British Women.
