Martha Quest (1952) is the second novel of British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing, and the first of the five-volume semi-autobiographical The Children of Violence series, which traces Martha Quest’s life to middle age. The other volumes in The Children of Violence are A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). Novelist C. P. Snow, in a review of Martha Quest, in the Sunday Times, described Doris Lessing, as "one of the most powerfully equipped young novelists now writing."