Doris Lessing’s 1963 short story “To Room Nineteen” explores the theme of female independence and autonomy—and of how difficult these are to achieve, especially at the time Lessing wrote it. Any reader familiar with Virginia Woolf’s classic essay “A Room of One’s Own” will find similarities here. Lessing, a Nobel laureate and accomplished writer within multiple genres, investigates boundaries and conventions throughout the canon of her work, frequently breaking down dichotomies and questioning cultural assumptions. One of the most frequently anthologized of Lessing’s stories, “To Room Nineteen” is included in the 8th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F.

The story begins by analyzing a marriage that seems ideal. Susan and Matthew Rawlings appear to belong together: “Not only they, but others, felt they were well matched” (2544). However, it is also clear from the opening sentence that this seemingly “well matched” arrangement is ultimately doomed: “This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence” (2544).

For the first few paragraphs, the unnamed and omniscient narrator takes pains to describe how utterly conventional and stable this marriage is. Susan, the protagonist of the story, marries Matthew, quits her job when she becomes pregnant, and raises their four children on Matthew’s lucrative salary. Susan has everything that she should want according to her friends, acquaintances, and society at large. She plans to return to work after the children are grown, and she and Matthew will enjoy growing old together in mutual happiness.

At some point, Matthew confesses to an affair, which seems to Susan both banal and bothersome: It’s essentially expected—“no one can be faithful to another person for a whole lifetime” (2546)—and yet she “would sometimes be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness” (2547). This ideal marriage and conventional life turn out not to satisfy Susan’s desires, even though these needs remain unarticulated and undefined even to Susan herself.

Once the twins, the youngest of their children, begin school, Susan finds that her days stretch out interminably. She endeavors to keep herself busy, reckoning that all she need do is “learn to be [her]self again” after 12 years of identifying as a wife and mother (2549). She begins to become accustomed to the children being away at school and dreads the upcoming holidays. After a few days of once familiar family togetherness, Susan becomes irrationally angry with the twins and berates herself for such behavior while Matthew tries to comfort her.

Nevertheless, Susan remains both remorseful and restless; she cannot understand why she is so desperately unhappy and feels genuine guilt at her distance and irritability, yet she cannot seem to return to her “normal,” loving self. She even conjures up “the devil” to explain her detachment from and disenchantment with her family and her life: “He is lurking in the garden and sometimes even in the house, and he wants to get into me and to take me over” (2553). At one point she believes she actually sees this devil in her garden.

After this incident, Susan decides that she must have a room of her own—an earlier experiment with setting aside “Mother’s Room” within the household failed—and asks Matthew for a sum of money each week, though she doesn’t directly tell him what she will spend it on. She will hire an au pair—a live-in nanny—to care for the children while she goes to a rented room in a seedy hotel. While Matthew is initially resistant, he eventually agrees to the plan, not knowing what Susan’s actual purpose is or understanding her needs. Sophie Traub, a young and cheerful woman from Germany, joins the household, and Susan begins her weekly journeys to Fred’s Hotel and Room 19.

Susan spends her time in Room 19 alone with her own thoughts and no responsibilities. Eventually, the “room […] become[s] more her own than the house she live[s] in” (2559). She rediscovers her solitude and begins shedding all of her assumed identities in the process: In Room 19, she is “no longer Susan Rawlings” (2559). She seems unconcerned with determining who exactly she is, but she returns home feeling like “an imposter” when she interacts with her family (2559).

Eventually, Matthew becomes consumed with curiosity about where Susan goes when she leaves the house, hires a private detective, and discovers her special room at the hotel. Learning that he has found her out, Susan returns home early, retires to the bedroom unannounced, and watches as Sophie comforts her daughter, who is home sick from school.

Matthew assumes that Susan has been having an affair, and she falsely confesses to his accusation, thinking that it will be easier for him to understand than the truth. He in turn confesses to his own long-term affair and suggests that his paramour and her lover, the invented “Michael Plant,” have lunch together. While Susan herself is horrified at their mutual dishonesty, she understands how Matthew, and presumably most of their social set, sees it: “So now she was saddled with a lover, and he had a mistress! How ordinary, how reassuring, how jolly!” (2563). Their acceptance of the situation would be the height of “civilized tolerance” (2563).

However, Matthew has no capacity to understand her real predicament or to respect her true desires. She reasons that in her absence Matthew will remarry either his current lover or Sophie, who has already become like a mother to her children. She returns to Room 19 one final time, closes the windows, and places a rug under the door, turns on the gas, and “[is] quite content lying there, listening to the faint soft hiss of the gas that pour[s] into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drift[s] off into the dark river” (2565). Her apparent suicide closes the story, finalizing the “failure in intelligence” with which it begins.