Doris Lessing
born Oct. 22, 1919, Kermānshāh,
Persia [now Iran]
British writer
whose novels and short stories are largely
concerned with people involved in the social
and political upheavals of the 20th century.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2007.
Her family was
living in Persia at the time of her birth
but moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe), where she lived from age
five until she settled in England in 1949.
In her early adult years she was an active
communist. In Pursuit of the English (1960)
tells of her initial months in England, and
Going Home (1957) describes her reaction to
Rhodesia on a return visit. In 1994 she
published the first volume of an
autobiography, Under My Skin; a second
volume, Walking in the Shade, appeared in
1997.
Her first published
book, The Grass Is Singing (1950), is about
a white farmer and his wife and their
African servant in Rhodesia. Among her most
substantial works is the series Children of
Violence (1952–69), a five-novel sequence
that centres on Martha Quest, who grows up
in southern Africa and settles in England.
The Golden Notebook (1962), in which a woman
writer attempts to come to terms with the
life of her times through her art, is one of
the most complex and the most widely read of
her novels. The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975)
is a prophetic fantasy that explores
psychological and social breakdown. A master
of the short story, Lessing has published
several collections, including The Story of
a Non-Marrying Man (1972) and Stories
(1978); her African stories are collected in
This Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951) and
The Sun Between Their Feet (1973).
Lessing turned to
science fiction in a five-novel sequence
titled Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–83).
The novels The Diary of a Good Neighbour
(1983) and If the Old Could… (1984) were
published pseudonymously under the name Jane
Somers to dramatize the problems of unknown
writers. Subsequent novels include The Good
Terrorist (1985), about a group of
revolutionaries in London, and The Fifth
Child (1988), a horror story, to which Ben,
in the World (2000) is a sequel. The
Sweetest Dream (2001) is a
semiautobiographical novel set primarily in
London during the 1960s, while the
parable-like novel The Cleft (2007)
considers the origins of human society. Her
collection of essays Time Bites (2004)
displays her wide-ranging interests, from
women’s issues and politics to Sufism.
