The other volumes in The Children of Violence are A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969).

[2] At the beginning of the novel Martha is fifteen years old, "living on an impoverished African farm with her parents; a girl of passionate vitality, avid for experience and for self-knowledge, bitterly resentful of the conventional narrowness of her home life".

She then becomes a typist in the provincial capital where "she begins to encounter the real life she is so eager to experience and understand.

"[3] Lessing's first novel The Grass Is Singing published in 1950, also takes place in Southern Rhodesia, and, set during the 1940s, deals with the racial politics between the British settlers and Africans in that country.

In 1956, Lessing's courageous outspokenness led her to being declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.