Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was born Doris Tayler in Kermanshah, Persia, where her father, a First World War veteran who had lost a leg, worked for a bank. In 1925 the family moved to a maize farm in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, which never prospered. She left school at thirteen and educated herself by reading. Two early marriages, the second to the German communist Gottfried Lessing, ended in divorce, and in 1949 she moved to London with her youngest son and the manuscript of her first novel.

The Grass Is Singing (1950), about a white farmer’s wife and her Black servant, exposed the fears beneath colonial life and launched her career. The five Children of Violence novels followed a woman, Martha Quest, from Rhodesia into postwar London. Lessing joined and then, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, left the British Communist Party, and her opposition to white minority rule led to her being barred from Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. The Golden Notebook (1962), with its divided structure of a writer’s notebooks, became a touchstone for readers of the women’s movement, though she rejected the label. She then turned to inner experience and Sufi thought, and to the speculative Canopus in Argos sequence.

Later novels included The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child, and she published two books under the pseudonym Jane Somers to show how hard it is for unknown writers to be published. At eighty-seven she became the oldest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in London in 2013.