Doris Lessing (born as Doris May Tayler, 1919) is a British writer. On 2007 Lessing was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the citation for the prize, Lessing was described by the Swedish Academy as ”that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.
Biography
Lessing's father moved his family to Kermanshah, in Persia (now Iran), in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was here that Lessing was born. The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian life style amongst the rough ... (
environment. The farm was not successful and failed to deliver the wealth Lessing's parents had expected.
Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare). Lessing left school aged 13, and thereafter was self-educated. She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, and it was around this time that Lessing started reading material on politics and sociology that her employer gave her to read. She began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband and had two children, before the marriage ended in 1943.
Following her divorce, Lessing was drawn to the Left Book Club, a socialist book club, and it was here that she met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group and had a child together, before the marriage also ended in divorce in 1949. Lessing moved to London with her youngest son in 1949 and her first novel,
The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950. Her breakthrough work was
The Golden Notebook written in 1962.
Lessing's collection of short novels,
Five earned her the Somerset Maugham Award for 1954. The French translation of
The Golden Notebook won the Prix Medici in 1976. In 1982 she received the Austrian State Prize for Literature and the Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg. Lessing has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times:
Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971),
The Sirian Experiments (1981) and
The Good Terrorist (1985) and won the W. H. Smith Award in 1985.
Style
Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme (1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues, the psychological theme (1956–1969), and after that the Sufi theme, which was explored in a science fiction setting in the
Canopus series.
Lessing's switch to science fiction was not popular with many critics. Lessing replied: ”What they didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like
Blood Music, by Greg Bear. He's a great writer.”
Her novel
The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars, but notably not by the author herself, who later wrote that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one's self from illusions had been overlooked by critics. Lessing does not like the idea of being pigeon-holed as a feminist author. When asked why, she replies: ”What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.” (Doris Lessing,
The New York Times, 1982)
When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the
Canopus in Argos series. These books show, from many different perspectives, an advanced society's efforts at Forced evolution. The Canopus series is based partly on Sufi concepts, to which Lessing was introduced by Idries Shah. Earlier works of ”inner space” fiction like
Briefing for a Descent into Hell and
Memoirs of a Survivor also connect to this theme.
Apart from this, she has also written several short stories about cats, which are her favourite animals.
As author of the Canopus in Argos series, Lessing was Writer Guest of Honour at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), and made a well-received speech in which she described her science-fictional
Memoirs of a Survivor as ”an attempt at an autobiography.” Unlike some mainstream authors, she has never hesitated to admit that she writes science fiction.
Other works
The Children of Violence:
Martha Quest (1952)
A Proper Marriage (1954)
A Ripple from the Storm (1958)
Landlocked (1965)
The Four-Gated City (1969)
Other novels:
The Grass is Singing (1950)
Five (1953)
The Golden Notebook (1962)
The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983)
If the Old Could... (1984)
The Good Terrorist (1985)
The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987)
Love, Again (1996)
The Sweetest Dream (2001)
The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (2003)
The Cleft (2007)
Collections:
This Was the Old Chief's Country (1951)
Five (short stories) (1953)
The Habit of Loving (1957)
A Man and Two Women (1963)
African Stories (1964)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney and other Stories (1972)
London Observed: Stories and Sketches (1993)
Spies I Have Known (1995)
The Pit (1996)
Cat Tales:
Particularly Cats (1967)
Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivo (1993)
The Old Age of El Magnifico (2000)
Nonfiction:
Going Home (memoir, 1957)
In Pursuit of the English (1960)
A Small Personal Voice (essays, 1974)
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (essays, 1987)
African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (memoir, 1992)
Conversations (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1994)
Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (1994)
Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949 to 1962 (1997)
This author profile is licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the
Wikipedia article ”Doris Lessing”. Photo source:
Wikimedia Commons.
