Doris Lessing was one of the best known British writers and in 2007 she won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Background
Doris Lessing (maiden name Doris May Tayler) was born on October 22, 1919, in Persia, Kermanshah (modern Bahtaran, Iran). Her father was an army officer, and her mother was a nurse. In 1925, when Doris was 6, the family moved to South Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which was then a British colony. Lessing described the years spent in Africa as a nightmare with quite a bit of fun. Unhappy childhood was one of the reasons why she began to write, telling about the relationship between black Africans and colonizers and about two different cultures.
Education
Doris studied in a Catholic school, then was sent to a girls' school in Salisbury (now Harare) where she studied up to 14. She ended her schooling at 14.
Career
Doris Lessing's early novels employ the methods of sociological realism to criticize colonial attitudes toward race, politics, and women's role in society.
The heroines who populate the work of Doris Lessing belong to the avant garde of their day.
Lessing's childhood was spent in the hills near the farm. She grew up in Southern Rhodesia in a setting described in Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954), the first two volumes of her five-volume work, Children of Violence.
The book, a chronicle of life in Africa which took its title from T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land, " was published in 1950 and was immediately well received. After her arrival in England Lessing wrote a great number of short stories, books, plays, poems, essays, and reviews.
Her most significant works include the short story collections This Was The Old Chief's Country (1951), A Man and Two Women (1963), and African Stories (1957) and the novels that make up the "Children of Violence" series—Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969)—as well as the novels Five (1953), Retreat to Innocence (1956), The Golden Notebook (1962), and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971).
While Lessing was also prolific in producing non-fiction, it is in her fiction that she made her strongest statements.
Her writing borders on the autobiographical.
Her fictional accounts of Africa and England bear a strong resemblance to her own life, and the heroines of her novels greatly resemble each other and their creator.
Her books all deal with the same themes: the problem of racism in British colonial Africa and the place of women in a male-dominated world and their escape from the social and sexual repression of that world.
These are the themes of Lessing's life as well as her work. While these and a few other subjects appear in almost all her work, they are most deeply explored and most fully realized in Lessing's two watershed works—the "Children of Violence" series and The Golden Notebook.
The five-novel series takes its heroine, Martha Quest, from a farm in central Africa to the capital of the colony—where she is exposed to city society—and on to London.
The Golden Notebook with its meticulously crafted construction is about patterns—patterns in art and patterns in society.
Freedom, the freedom to break these patterns, is Lessing's goal—for her characters, for her work, and for herself.
The books sold poorly and were largely unreviewed until the real identify of the author became known. Lessing never found any obstacles too daunting for her when it came to writing.
Lessing also did some nonfiction work: In Pursuit of the English (Simon & Schuster, 1961) about her youth in London, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (Harper and Row, 1987), a collection of lectures, and The Wind Blows Away Our Words (Vintage Books, 1987), which described in detail the sufferings of Afghan refugees from the Soviet invasion of their country.
And her characters were exiles as well.
But the Lessing heroines are not simply vehicles for social criticism; they are not just trumpets for certain causes.
They are fully realized works of fiction.
Lessing's contribution was not to any cause, but to literature.
Under My Skin (1994), the first volume of Lessing's autobiography, chronicles her early years, her espousal of Communism, and her marriages, ending with her departure from Africa.
The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight (1982), was the basis for a 1988 opera by the composer Philip Glass.
The Real Thing (1992) is a collection of articles, sketches, and stories that constitute a portrait of modern-day London.
In 1952-1956 Doris Lessing was an active member of the British Communist Party (with which later she became disillusioned) and participated in the antinuclear movement.
Connections
Doris Lessing was married to Frank Charles Wisdom, with whom she had a daughter Jean and a son John. The couple divorced in 1943, and Doris left the children with their father. In 1945 Doris married to Gottfried Lessing, a German immigrant. From this marriage Doris had a son, with whom she left Africa in 1949 after a divorce and moved to London to start a new life of the writer.