A woman's immersion in a Communist circle — its meetings, rhetoric, romances, hypocrisies — and the gradual erosion of faith in ideological purity.

Martha Quest is now in London, post-war, politically alert and increasingly disillusioned. Lessing doesn’t caricature belief; she is almost surgeon-like in her details around the seduction of certainty, the intimacy of shared conviction, the subtle policing of doubt.

Martha isn’t simply radicalised or cured; she is sharpened by contradiction. The “storm” as an internal weather is a metaphor for the slow, grinding recognitions that fracture the people inside them.

Some prolific underlining and marginalia, but still perfectly readable (they were very neat, you can see in the video).