A Proper Marriage (1954) is the second novel in British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing five volume, semi-autobiographical, series, Children of Violence.

The Children of Violence series, follows the life of protagonist Martha Quest "from girlhood to middle age".

[1] A Proper Marriage continues the story of Lessing's eponymous protagonist that she began in Martha Quest.

In that novel Martha, aged fifteen left the Southern Rhodesian farm on which she was brought up to work as a typist in the provincial capital, 'the big city'.

[2] A Proper Marriage reveals the way in which "Martha's rebellious temperament reacted to her new life", and of "her growing discontent with the young married set to which she and her husband Douglas now belong; of the arrival of her baby, which seems another threat to her freedom".