Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing the British novelist, poet, playwright and short-story writer (1919-2013) born in Persia and raised in Southern Rhodesia, whose wide-ranging fiction, from The Grass Is Singing to The Golden Notebook and the science-fiction series Canopus in Argos, earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early Life in Persia and Africa

Doris May Tayler was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia, where her British father worked for a bank. The family moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1925, hoping to prosper as farmers, and she grew up on a remote farm in the bush. The experience of colonial Africa, its landscape and its racial and social hierarchies, became the foundation of much of her writing.

Her upbringing was unhappy. Her mother was strict and the family was isolated, and she was sent to a convent school and then to a girls' school in Salisbury, which she left at fourteen. She educated herself thereafter by reading widely, and she worked as a telephone operator, a stenographer and a journalist in Salisbury, where she began to write.

She married twice, first Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children, and then Gottfried Lessing, a German refugee and communist, with whom she had a son. The second marriage ended in 1949, and she left Africa for London with her young son, determined to make her living as a writer. The move marked the beginning of her long career in England.

The Early Novels and the African Experience

Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, appeared in 1950 and was an immediate success. It tells the story of Mary Turner, the wife of a poor white farmer in Southern Rhodesia, and of her relationship with her black servant Moses, which ends in her murder. The novel confronts the racial and sexual tensions of colonial society with a directness that shocked many readers of the time.

This was followed by the five novels of the Children of Violence series, beginning with Martha Quest in 1952. The series follows its heroine, Martha, from her girlhood in Africa through her marriages and her involvement with communism to a final vision of apocalypse. It is at once a portrait of an individual and a chronicle of the political and social movements of the mid twentieth century.

She also drew on her African experience in the short stories collected in This Was the Old Chief's Country and in other volumes, and in the novel The Golden Notebook's African sections. Her writing about Africa is distinguished by its unsentimental observation and by its sympathy for the poor and the dispossessed, black and white alike.

The Golden Notebook and Political Writing

The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, is her most famous and most ambitious novel. It uses an innovative structure of four notebooks, each representing a different aspect of the life of the writer Anna Wulf, alongside a conventional narrative, and the whole is bound together by a fifth, golden notebook. The form enacts the fragmentation of a woman's experience and the difficulty of holding a life together in a single story.

The novel deals with politics, sexuality, motherhood, writing and mental breakdown. It engages with the disillusion of communists after the revelations of Stalin's crimes, a subject she knew from her own membership of the Communist Party, which she left in 1956. It was taken up by the women's movement as a landmark, though Lessing herself resisted describing it as a feminist manifesto, insisting that it was about the whole of a person's life.

Her political engagement continued in essays, journalism and fiction. She wrote about racism, colonialism, the nuclear threat and the condition of women, and her work of the 1950s and 1960s established her as one of the most serious and most widely read novelists of her generation. She was also active in campaigns against apartheid and for other causes.

Science Fiction and Later Experiment

In the late 1970s Lessing surprised her readers by turning to science fiction with the series Canopus in Argos: Archives, beginning with Shikasta in 1979. These novels present a cosmic history in which advanced civilisations intervene in the affairs of Earth, and they use the conventions of the genre to explore questions of evolution, memory, good and evil.

She also wrote the novels The Good Terrorist, which examines the psychology of a young woman drawn into political violence, and The Fifth Child, a disturbing tale of a family disrupted by the birth of a strange and violent child. These works show her continuing interest in the darker aspects of human nature and in the social forces that shape individual lives.

Her later years produced a stream of novels, memoirs and essays, including the autobiography Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade. She experimented with form throughout her career, moving between realism, satire, science fiction and memoir, and she never settled into a single manner. This restlessness is central to her achievement.

Awards, Ideas and Legacy

In 2007 Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eleventh woman to receive the prize, and the academy praised her for the epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny. She received the news with characteristic impatience, but the award recognised a career of extraordinary length and range.

She wrote more than fifty books, including novels, short stories, essays, plays and a libretto. She was a writer of strong opinions, and her work consistently asked uncomfortable questions about politics, race, gender and the future of humanity. Her willingness to change direction and to take risks kept her writing fresh over more than half a century.

She died on 17 November 2013 in London. Her novels, especially The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing, remain widely read and studied, and her influence on later women writers has been considerable. She is remembered as a fearless and prolific author whose work continually crossed the boundaries of genre and whose curiosity about the world never diminished.

See also

• The Golden Notebook
• The Grass Is Singing
• Canopus in Argos
• Nobel Prize in Literature