A Woman on a Roof

Originally published in 1963 in the short story collection A Man and Two Women, “A Woman on a Roof” by Doris Lessing emerged during a time of social and political upheaval in the Western world. Like many of Lessing’s other works, the story explores the effects of class inequality and the misunderstandings between men and women that arise in a patriarchal culture.

Lessing was born in former Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and moved to London in 1949, where she continued to publish and participate in political activism. Many of her works are set in Africa, while others, like “A Woman on a Roof,” are set in England and explore Western contexts. In her lifetime, Lessing published dozens of popular and critically acclaimed works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, culminating in her winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This guide refers to “A Woman on a Roof” as it appears in A Man and Two Women, published in 1963 by Simon and Schuster.

“A Woman on a Roof” takes place over six days in London during an unusually intense heat wave. The three primary characters—Tom, Stanley, and Harry—work on the rooftop and in the basement of a high-rise apartment building in a fashionable part of the city. As the story opens, the sun is beating down on the rooftop, and the men struggle to complete their work in the hostile conditions. The steel gutters they are replacing become too hot to touch, and they joke about “getting an egg off some woman in the flats below them to poach it for their dinner” (72).  

Eventually Harry, being the eldest at 45 and the most practical, borrows a blanket from a housewife in the apartment building to use as a makeshift tarp for the men to shade themselves and their workspace. Even this is only a modest improvement, as the sun keeps moving, forcing the men to adjust the blanket constantly to keep the gutters cool.  

The unpleasant working environment offers one advantage: “There was a fine view over several acres of roof” (72), including a nearby rooftop where a young woman sunbathes wearing only “a red scarf tied around her breasts and brief red bikini pants” (73).

As a newlywed, the 20-something Stanley has the most surprising initial reaction: Annoyed to discover that “She’s stark naked” (73), Stanley threatens to report her to the police on several occasions throughout the story. Her presence seems to put him in a bad mood, and more than once he remarks aloud that if she were his wife, he would not allow such behavior.

At this introductory stage of the story, a 17-year-old, virginal Tom defends the woman by suggesting that “She thinks no one can see” (73).

The long-married, middle-aged Harry is a paternal figure for the other men, and he shrugs off the presence of the nameless woman on the roof. When Stanley wolf whistles at her, Harry says, “Small things amuse small minds” (73). He chastises Stanley for leering at the woman, saying, “What about your missus?” to which Stanley replies with indifference, “thereby preserving his independence” (73). Later, only the young Tom sees her when she folds down the red bikini pants over her hips “until they are no more than a small triangle” (74). He keeps this information to himself, already nurturing an imagined intimacy between himself and this woman he has never met.

On day two, the woman’s skin has tanned overnight, so that whereas before “she was a scarlet and white woman,” now “she [is] a brown woman” (74). As on the first day, Stanley is the first to whistle. When she is startled by the whistle and turns to see all of them staring, her indifference motivates them into a collective series of catcalls and whistles. They are angry with her for ignoring them, and even Harry is momentarily swept up in the collective emotion. Even though there is work to be done in the basement, the men choose to stay up on the roof “where they f[eel] freer and on a different level than the rest of humanity shut up on the street or in buildings” (74). For the first time, Tom and Stanley go out of their way to get a closer look at the woman, crossing rooftops and climbing down exterior walls until they are standing directly above her on a small, projecting roof.

As she continues to ignore them, Stanley becomes more and more furious. On several of the days, the woman attempts to move out of their line of sight and to sunbathe at hours when she believes they are not working. Deprived of the sight of this woman, the men elect to work in the basement to escape the heat. Nevertheless, they come up to the roof during lunch or before they leave work for the day, hoping to get a glimpse of her. By the end of day three, Stanley manages to get a response by screaming at her, which startles her sufficiently to cause her to drop her belongings, including papers and books. When “Finally, she acknowledged them with an angry look,” Harry quips that she should watch out for the “slippery ladders, love” (77).

At this point, Tom strategically ceases participation in the cat-calling and finds himself “full of secret delight because he knew her anger was for the others and not for him” (77). Tom’s fantasies about the woman grow more unrealistic over the course of the workweek. In his inexperienced mind, he begins to believe that she sees him as a viable partner.

On day four, when the men come up to the rooftop at lunch, Tom begins reminiscing about fantasies of her from the night before in which she wore a black negligee and invited him into her bedroom, which had white carpet and a white, padded-leather headboard. When he first discovers that the unnamed woman is unavailable for his viewing pleasure, “he [feels] betrayed by her not being there” (78). Later, when she emerges from her apartment and notices the men working on the roof, she moves to a spot where she can sunbathe without their watching. Rather than feeling disappointed, Tom is glad. “He f[eels] she [i]s more his when the other men [can]not see her” (78). As the naïve and virginal adolescent becomes more entrenched in his fantasy, his view of the woman’s role changes.

On the final day that the trio works in the heat wave, Harry puts a stop to Stanley’s rage-filled outburst at the woman, during which he whistles, stamps his feet, and screams at her until she acknowledges them. To avoid trouble with the employer, the residents, or the woman herself, Harry makes the decision to tell the foreman they will be quitting for the remainder of the day and will return to work when the heat wave breaks. Stanley and Tom follow his lead for different reasons. Stanley has worked himself into a frenzy, and the narrator suggests his white pallor may indicate sunstroke.

For Tom, quitting early that day offers him the moment he has been waiting for all week—the one in which he breaks away from his co-workers and introduces himself to the woman on the roof, who he anticipates will reciprocate his romantic interest. She does not. In fact, the meeting goes nothing like Tom—"the slight, scarlet-faced excited boy” (81), from her perspective—expects. The woman holds back her anger, but with difficulty. She tells him that if he likes to watch girls in bikinis, he should take a bus to the Lido (in British English, a public outdoor swimming place, whether a pool or a beach). He continues trying to strike up a conversation with her for several minutes, but what he gets in response is mostly a view of “the tension in her back, her arms, her thighs—the tension of waiting for him to go” (81).

Tom’s looks back at the roof where he and the other men were working and thinks angrily, “And they expect us to work in these conditions!” (82). He finally leaves and gets drunk “in hatred of her” (82). The next day, rain finally comes, allowing the men to finish their work.