The Four-Gated City, published in 1969, is the concluding novel in British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing's five-volume, semi-autobiographical series The Children of Violence,[1] which she began, in 1952, with Martha Quest.

Martha intends this employment to be temporary, but she elects to stay with the Coldridge family after Mark's brother Colin defects to the Soviet Union, leaving behind his son, Paul.

Already more progressive than his Tory parents, Mark shifts politically to the left, briefly becoming a communist and, in the longer term, engaging actively with the anti-nuclear movement.

The first four novels of the Children of Violence sequence “trace the heroine’s… formation from childhood to adulthood, characteristically emphasizing those experiences that place her in direct confrontation with life; also, they focus on her degree of success in assimilating these experiences as she attempts to find her niche in society.” Yet “at the final point of integration with society, the ultimate goal of the Bildungsprozess… Martha breaks with tradition: once she has reached the stage where she has learned all that her immediate world has to offer, she rejects, rather than affirms, the identity which she has created out of her experience.”[10] Molly Hite observes, similarly, that “Martha, who for four volumes of the Children of Violence series has been a more or less conventional protagonist, dissolves into a series of roles, a vehicle for impersonal forces, one perspective on a version of a reality approached from other directions by other characters.

It "criticizes the scientists who have created and perpetuate a climate in which "rationalism" has become a new God"; the novel further explores the possibilities of people having " 'extra-sensory perception', in varying degrees, but "have been brainwashed into suppressing it, and that schizophrenia is the name of our blindest contemporary prejudice".