Doris Lessing (1919 - 2013) was a British novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007. [2] Raised in Southern Rhodesia, she drew on colonial Africa in her first novel The Grass Is Singing and returned repeatedly to questions of race, politics, communism and the experience of women. [1] Her best-known book, The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, was taken up as a founding text of modern feminism, a reading she herself resisted. [4]
Early life
Doris May Tayler was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia, where her father worked for a bank after being wounded in the First World War. [1] In 1925 the family moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to farm maize in the district of Banket. The farm was not a success, and Lessing's childhood was marked by her mother's frustrated ambitions and by the racial order of the colony.
She was sent to a convent school in Salisbury and left formal education at fourteen, continuing to read on her own and working as a nursemaid, telephone operator and typist. [3] She married Frank Wisdom in 1939 and had two children, left that marriage, and in 1945 married Gottfried Lessing, a German communist exile, with whom she had a son.
London and early fiction
In 1949 Lessing moved to London with her youngest son and the manuscript of a novel. The Grass Is Singing, published in 1950, examines the relationship between a white farmer's wife and a Black servant and its violent end, and established her reputation immediately. [1]
She joined the Communist Party in the early 1950s and left it after 1956. Her criticism of white minority rule led both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa to declare her a prohibited immigrant for many years. [3] Between 1952 and 1969 she published the five novels of the Children of Violence sequence, following the semi-autobiographical Martha Quest from colonial Africa to postwar Britain.
The Golden Notebook and later work
The Golden Notebook (1962) presents the writer Anna Wulf through four coloured notebooks recording politics, Africa, fiction and private life, together with a framing narrative, dramatising both a personal breakdown and the fracturing of postwar left-wing certainty. [4] It was widely read as a feminist statement, though Lessing insisted its subject was the fragmentation of the individual and of the age.
Her later work ranged widely. Between 1979 and 1983 she published the five-volume Canopus in Argos sequence of speculative fiction, to the discomfort of some critics, and she continued to produce realist novels including The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child. [1] In the early 1980s she published two novels under the name Jane Somers, which were rejected by her own publisher and sold modestly, an experiment she used to illustrate the difficulties facing unknown writers. She also wrote memoirs, plays, poetry, essays and an opera libretto, and developed a long interest in Sufi thought.
Nobel Prize and final years
Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, at the age of eighty-seven, cited as an epicist of the female experience who had subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny. [2] She learned of the award from reporters waiting outside her London home on her return from shopping.
She declined appointment as a Dame of the British Empire but accepted the Companion of Honour. [3] She died in London on 17 November 2013.
Legacy
Lessing's range across realism, political fiction, autobiography and science fiction is unusual among writers of her standing, and her insistence on treating women's inner lives as a serious literary subject shaped fiction written after her. [4] Her African novels remain among the most significant literary treatments of settler colonialism in southern Africa. [1]
