British author Doris Lessing wrote the short novel The Fifth Child in 1998. It tells the story of a happily married couple, Harriet and David, who already have four children, but whose lives become fractured and difficult after the birth of Ben, the eponymous fifth child.
The book is set in the 1960s, just as society was getting "looser" and the Sexual Revolution is gaining some traction. This juxtaposes with Harriet and David's ideals; Harriet is a virgin when the two marry and she is highly dubious about the pill. The couple adore being parents but the quiet of their home is shattered by Ben, and he is briefly placed in a group home by his parents. Although this brings much needed contentment back to the family, she ultimately brings him home again. Lessing herself related to Harriet, and had abandoned three of her own children, taking just one, her youngest, to London with her after leaving her husband.
Lessing was considered both a controversial writer and also a threat to national security in her day; after leaving Zimbabwe, where she had been raised, she began to take an interest in anti-nuclear politics, and became openly so left-wing that she was surveilled by the government for twenty years. She was also banned from South Africa and Zimbabwe for her anti-apartheid stance.
Although Lessing published her first novel in 1950, she is best known for The Golden Notebook which was published twelve years later. In 2007, at the age of eighty-eight, she became the oldest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. She passed away in 2013 at the age of ninety four.
