| The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels | |
| Border: | yes |
| Author: | Doris Lessing |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Publisher: | Flamingo |
| Release Date: | 2003 |
| Media Type: | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages: | 311 |
| Isbn: | 978-0-00-715279-7 |
| Dewey: | 823/.914 22 |
| Congress: | PR6023.E833 G69 2003b |
| Oclc: | 55588850 |
The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels is collection of four novellas published in 2003 by 2007 Nobel laureate Doris Lessing.
The 2013 Australian-French film Adore (alternatively known as Adoration) is based on the story The Grandmothers. The director Anne Fontaine said Lessing told her when they met that it was based on a true story that took place in a small community in Australia.[1] In 2014, the story Victoria and the Staveneys was adapted into a French film by Jean-Paul Civeyrac called Mon amie Victoria.[2]
The story then flashes back to the childhood of Roz and Lil, inseparable friends through school and university, who had a double wedding, settled with their husbands in adjoining houses at a seaside resort and each had one son. When Roz's husband took a job elsewhere, she did not follow him, preferring to stay by the beach with her soulmate Lil and their two beautiful sons, who were as inseparable as their mothers. Then Lil's husband died in an accident, leaving her well-off. During the summer holidays when the fatherless boys were seventeen, they each became the lover of their mother's best friend.
Time passed and the boys were out in the world, meeting young women of their age. When Tom decided to marry Mary, thereby abandoning Lil, Roz decided to renounce Ian. Taking it badly, the young man tried to kill himself surfing, but survived and was tended by Mary's friend Hannah. Another wedding followed, with both brides having baby daughters. Then, among Tom's things, Mary discovered old letters between him and Lil, and the story loops back to its opening.
At age 19, working in a West End music shop, she is recognised by Thomas, who asks her back to the home she has always dreamed about. They have an affair and later Victoria finds she's pregnant. As a single mother she gets a flat of her own and, after going back to work, marries a black musician who moves in with her but, after giving her another baby they call Dickson, dies in a road crash.
Seeing Thomas in the street, Victoria rings him up to say he has a six-year-old daughter called Mary, so he asks her round. The Staveneys insist on a DNA test and, when it is done, accept the sweet caramel-coloured Mary with joy, ignoring the difficult black Dickson who is no kin. They take Mary for a month's holiday in a cottage in Dorset, where Victoria joins them for a week but is intimidated by their lifestyle and hates the country. Later, they propose sending Mary to a good school, an idea with which Victoria wrestles. In the end she accepts that Mary will be brought up as a Staveney and lost to her, while she could always marry another black man and have more children.