Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing
Born	Doris May Tayler 22 10, 1919
Birthplace	Kermanshah, Persia
Died	Template:Death date and age London, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Writer
Known for	The Golden Notebook, The Grass Is Singing, Children of Violence series
Awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (2007), David Cohen Prize (2001)
Website	[http://www.dorislessing.org/ Official site]

Doris May Lessing Template:Post-nominals (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose career spanned more than six decades and produced over seventy works of fiction and nonfiction. Born to British parents in Persia and raised in Southern Rhodesia, Lessing arrived in London in 1949 with the manuscript of her first novel and the young son from her second marriage, having left behind two children from her first. From that beginning, she built one of the most substantial and unpredictable literary careers of the twentieth century, moving restlessly between realism and science fiction, political engagement and mysticism, autobiographical confession and formal experimentation. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, at the age of 87 — the oldest person to receive the honour — with the Swedish Academy describing her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." Her best-known novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), became a landmark text in feminist literature, though Lessing herself resisted the label.

Early Life

Doris May Tayler was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), to British parents. Her father, Alfred Cook Tayler, was a captain in the British Army who had lost a leg in the First World War. Her mother, Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), had been Alfred's nurse during his convalescence, and the two married after the war. Alfred Tayler took a position as a clerk at the Imperial Bank of Persia, and it was there that the family lived during the first years of Doris's life.

In 1925, when Doris was six years old, the family relocated to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father had purchased a farm in the hope of growing maize and becoming wealthy. The family settled in the Lomagundi district, a remote area of the colony. Life on the farm was difficult and isolating. The venture did not yield the prosperity Alfred Tayler had envisioned, and the family struggled financially throughout Doris's childhood. The landscape of the African bush, the racial dynamics of settler colonialism, and the hardships of farm life would form the bedrock of much of Lessing's fiction, particularly her early novels and short stories set in southern Africa.

Lessing attended a Roman Catholic convent school and then Girls' High School in the capital, Salisbury (now Harare), but she left school at the age of fourteen and was largely self-educated thereafter. She read voraciously, working through the classics of European literature and political theory on her own. In interviews, she described her upbringing as profoundly unhappy, marked by a difficult relationship with her mother, whom she perceived as emotionally demanding and frustrated by the constraints of colonial life. Her father, by contrast, she recalled with greater sympathy, though he too was damaged by the war and its aftermath.

As a young woman, Lessing worked in a series of jobs in Salisbury, including as a telephone operator and a legal secretary. She began writing during this period, producing short stories and drafts of novels while immersing herself in the political and intellectual life of the colonial capital. She became involved with a left-wing political circle that introduced her to Marxist ideas and to the Communist Party, affiliations that would shape her writing and public identity for years to come.

Personal Life

Lessing married twice during her years in Southern Rhodesia. Her first marriage, in 1939, was to Frank Charles Wisdom, a civil servant. The couple had two children, John and Jean. The marriage ended in divorce in 1943, and Lessing left the two children with their father — a decision that attracted significant public scrutiny and commentary throughout her life and beyond.

In 1945, she married Gottfried Lessing, a German Jewish political activist and fellow member of the Communist group in Salisbury. They had one son, Peter. This marriage also ended in divorce, in 1949, and Doris Lessing departed for London with her youngest child and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing. Gottfried Lessing later became a diplomat and was killed during an attempted coup in Uganda in 1979.

After arriving in London, Lessing never remarried, though she had several significant relationships. She settled in the city and remained there for the rest of her life. In her later years, she cared for her son Peter, who suffered from a chronic illness.

Doris Lessing died on 17 November 2013 at her home in London, at the age of 94.

Career

Early Novels and African Fiction

Lessing's first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), was published shortly after her arrival in London and drew on her experience of life in Southern Rhodesia. The novel tells the story of a white farmer's wife and her relationship with a Black servant, exploring the psychic damage wrought by the racial hierarchies of colonial society. The book was a critical and commercial success, establishing Lessing as a significant new voice in English-language fiction.

Between 1952 and 1969, Lessing published the five novels that form the Children of Violence sequence: Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The series follows Martha Quest from her childhood on an African farm through her political awakening, marriages, motherhood, and eventual emigration to London. The novels draw extensively on Lessing's own biography and chart the intellectual and political currents of mid-twentieth-century life, including communism, colonialism, feminism, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The final volume, The Four-Gated City, marked a notable shift toward speculative and mystical themes, foreshadowing the direction of much of Lessing's later work.

During this period, Lessing was also active as a member of the British Communist Party, which she had joined upon arriving in London. Her political commitments informed much of her early fiction and nonfiction, though she grew increasingly disillusioned with Soviet communism. She formally left the Communist Party in 1954, following revelations about Stalinist repression, but continued to identify with left-wing and anti-colonial causes.

The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, is generally considered Lessing's most important and influential single work. The novel centres on Anna Wulf, a writer experiencing a creative and personal crisis, who keeps four notebooks — black, red, yellow, and blue — each devoted to a different aspect of her experience: her African past, her political life, a fictional narrative, and a personal diary. A fifth, golden notebook attempts to integrate the fragments. The novel's fragmented structure was formally innovative, and its unflinching treatment of women's interior lives — including sexuality, mental breakdown, political disillusionment, and creative paralysis — struck a chord with readers in the context of the emerging feminist movement of the 1960s.

The Golden Notebook became a landmark of feminist literature and was adopted by the women's movement as a foundational text. Lessing, however, expressed ambivalence about this reception, arguing that the novel's formal experimentation and its broader themes of fragmentation and integration had been overshadowed by its identification as a feminist polemic. In her 1971 preface to the novel, she wrote that she had intended it as a statement about the nature of writing and the relationship between the individual and political commitment, not as a manifesto for women's liberation. Nevertheless, the book's influence on feminist discourse and on the development of the novel form has been widely acknowledged.

Science Fiction and the Canopus Sequence

In the late 1970s, Lessing made a dramatic departure from the realistic fiction for which she was known, turning to science fiction with the five-novel sequence Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983). The series comprises Shikasta (1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983). These novels employ the framework of interplanetary civilisations and cosmic narratives to explore themes of colonialism, evolution, spiritual development, and the fate of humanity.

The shift to science fiction surprised and alienated some critics and readers who had valued Lessing's realist and politically engaged fiction. However, Lessing defended the genre as a legitimate vehicle for serious ideas, arguing that the literary establishment's disdain for science fiction was itself a form of snobbery. Her engagement with science fiction was informed by her interest in Sufism, which she had begun exploring in the 1960s under the influence of the writer and thinker Idries Shah. Sufi concepts of spiritual evolution and higher consciousness permeate the Canopus novels.

The Jane Somers Experiment

In 1984, Lessing conducted a notable literary experiment. She submitted two novels — The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could... (1984) — under the pseudonym Jane Somers, without informing her publishers of her true identity. The novels were published but received little critical attention and modest sales. When Lessing revealed the deception, she stated that her aim had been to demonstrate how difficult it was for unknown writers to gain recognition, and to expose what she considered the superficiality of the literary marketplace. The episode generated significant media attention and debate within the publishing industry.

Later Career

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Lessing continued to produce fiction at a prolific rate. The Good Terrorist (1985), a darkly comic novel about a group of would-be revolutionaries squatting in a London house, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Fifth Child (1988), a disturbing parable about a family disrupted by the birth of an aberrant child, was also widely praised and later received a sequel, Ben, in the World (2000).

In the 1990s, Lessing published two volumes of autobiography: Under My Skin (1994), covering her life up to 1949, and Walking in the Shade (1997), which continued the narrative through the 1960s. These works were praised for their candour and psychological insight, and they provided valuable context for understanding the autobiographical dimensions of her fiction.

Lessing also published several volumes of short stories throughout her career, as well as works of nonfiction, poetry, libretti, and plays. Her short fiction, often set in Africa, is considered among the finest in the English language. She wrote over seventy works in total across a career that extended from 1950 to 2013.

Banned from Southern Rhodesia and South Africa

Lessing's outspoken opposition to racial injustice in colonial Africa had direct personal consequences. She was declared a prohibited immigrant in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa in 1956, following the publication of fiction and nonfiction that criticised the racial order. The bans reflected the colonial authorities' view that her work was subversive. The ban in Rhodesia was not lifted until independence in 1980, when the country became Zimbabwe. She subsequently visited the country and wrote about the experience.

Recognition

Lessing accumulated a substantial record of literary honours over the course of her career. In 2001, she received the David Cohen Prize, a biennial award for a lifetime of achievement in British literature. In 2007, at the age of 87, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the oldest recipient of the prize at that time. The Swedish Academy's citation described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

Her reaction to the news of the Nobel Prize became a memorable moment in itself. Returning home from a shopping trip, she was met by reporters camped outside her door and responded with characteristic bluntness, remarking, "Oh Christ!" before sitting on her doorstep to absorb the news. In subsequent interviews, she described the prize as a "royal flush" and noted that she had been on the shortlist for years.

Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in 1999. She received the Golden PEN Award from English PEN for a lifetime's distinguished service to literature. She was also a Companion of the Royal Society of Literature.

Three of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize: The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Good Terrorist (1985), and The Fifth Child (1988). In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."

Her papers and manuscripts are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, a major archive of literary and cultural materials.

Legacy

Doris Lessing's literary output, produced over more than sixty years, is notable for its range, ambition, and willingness to confound expectation. She moved between literary realism and science fiction, political engagement and mystical inquiry, autobiography and formal experimentation, in a manner that made her difficult to classify and resistant to critical consensus. Her insistence on following her own intellectual and artistic instincts, even at the cost of alienating readers and critics, is a defining feature of her career.

The Golden Notebook remains her most discussed and taught work. Its formal innovations — the use of multiple notebooks to represent the fragmentation of a woman's consciousness — anticipated postmodern narrative techniques, while its content helped define the agenda of second-wave feminism. However, Lessing's repeated insistence that the novel was not principally a feminist text, and her broader resistance to being categorised, complicated her relationship with the feminist movement and ensured that her work could not be reduced to a single ideological framework.

Her early African fiction — particularly The Grass Is Singing and the Children of Violence sequence — provided some of the earliest and most psychologically acute portrayals of white settler society in southern Africa and its moral and psychological deformations. Her later science fiction, while divisive at the time of publication, has gained retrospective appreciation for its ambition and its integration of political and spiritual themes.

Lessing's decision to leave her two eldest children in Rhodesia when she moved to London in 1949 has remained a subject of discussion and debate, particularly in the context of broader conversations about motherhood, artistic vocation, and the expectations placed on women. Scholars and critics have examined this episode in her life through her fiction, her autobiographies, and her published letters, finding in it a tension between personal freedom and familial obligation that runs throughout her work.

The Doris Lessing Society, an academic organisation, promotes the study and appreciation of her work. Her official website, maintained during and after her lifetime, provides biographical information and resources for readers and scholars.