• Africa
• alienation
• Doris Lessing
• London
• marginality
• short story

Dealing with marginality as an existential condition inherent to humanity, this dissertation aims at demonstrating that this circumstance is a common ground for Doris Lessing's short story characters, specifically in the two collections African Stories (1964) and London Observed (1992).
In the first collection, set in Southern Rhodesia, current Zimbabwe and Lessing’s homeland until 1949, the theme of marginality is doubly linked to the characters’ subjection to the colonial system, a racist and sexist background, but also to the geographical distance between the African colony and the very centre of power, Great Britain.
In the attempt of demonstrating that such a marginal condition of individuals is not a context-related feature but rather a common one for humanity as a whole, I have chosen to explore the same theme in a collection which does not share the same geographical and political coordinates: London Observed, set at the very heart of Great Britain, is the ultimate evidence that no matter how characters approach the very centre in geographical and physical terms, they are still relegated to the margins of life.