Doris May LessingCHOMG (néeTayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist – sometimes identified as Rhodesian early in her career – and winner of theNobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Lessing was born to British parents inPersia, where she lived until she was 6 in 1925. Her family then moved toSouthern Rhodesia (nowZimbabwe), where she remained until moving in 1949 when she was 26 to London, England.
Lessing was awarded the2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, theSwedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".[2] Lessing was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, at age 87.[3][4][5]
In 2001 Lessing was awarded theDavid Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement inBritish literature. In 2008The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[6]
Lessing was born Doris May Tayler inKermanshah,Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), both British subjects.[7] Her father, who had lost a leg during his service inWorld War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at theRoyal Free Hospital in London where he was recovering from hisamputation.[8][9] The couple moved to Persia, for Alfred to take a job as a clerk for theImperial Bank of Persia.[10][11]
In 1925 the family moved to the British colony ofSouthern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize and other crops on about 1,000 acres (400 ha) of bush that Alfred bought. In the rough environment, his wife Emily aspired to lead anEdwardian lifestyle. It might have been possible had the family been wealthy; in reality, they were short of money and the farm delivered very little income.[12]
As a girl Doris was educated first at theDominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholicconventall-girls school in the Southern Rhodesian capital of Salisbury (nowHarare).[13] Then followed a year atGirls High School in Salisbury.[13] She left school at age 13 and was self-educated from then on. She left home at 15 and worked as anursemaid. She started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology[9] and began writing around this time.
In 1937 Doris moved to Salisbury to work as atelephone operator, and she soon married the man who became her first husband, civil servant Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John, 1940–1992, and Jean, born in 1941), before the marriage ended in 1943.[9] Lessing left the family home in 1943, leaving the two children with their father.[1]
After the divorce, Doris's interest was drawn to the community around theLeft Book Club, an organisation she had joined the year before.[12][14] It was here that she met her future second husband,Gottfried Lessing. They married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter, 1946–2013), before they divorced in 1949. She did not marry again.[9] Lessing also had a love affair with RAF serviceman John Whitehorn (brother of journalistKatharine Whitehorn), who was stationed in Southern Rhodesia, and wrote him ninety letters between 1943 and 1949.[15]
Lessing moved to London in 1949 with her younger son, Peter, to pursue her writing career and socialist beliefs, but left the two older children with their father Frank Wisdom. She later said that at the time she saw no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."[16]
On 21 August 2015, a five-volume secret file on Lessing, built up by bothMI5 andMI6, was made public and placed inThe National Archives.[20] The file, which contains documents that are redacted in parts, shows Lessing was under surveillance by MI5 and MI6 for around twenty years, from the early 1940s onwards. Her associations with communist organisations and political activism were reported to be the reasons for the surveillance of Lessing.[21]
Disaffected, and turning away from Marxist political philosophy, Lessing became increasingly absorbed with mystical and spiritual matters, devoting herself especially to theSufi tradition.[22]
At the age of fifteen, Lessing began to sell her stories to magazines.[23] Her first novel,The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950.[12] The work that gained her international attention,The Golden Notebook, was published in 1962.[11] By the time of her death, she had published more than 50 novels, some under a pseudonym.[24]
Lessing in 1984
In 1982 Lessing wrote two novels under the literary pseudonym Jane Somers to show the difficulty new authors face in trying to get their work printed. The novels were rejected by Lessing's UK publisher but later accepted by another English publisher,Michael Joseph, and in the US byAlfred A. Knopf.The Diary of a Good Neighbour[25] was published in Britain and the US in 1983 andIf the Old Could in both countries in 1984,[26] both as written by Jane Somers. In 1984 both novels were republished in both countries (Viking Books publishing in the US), this time under one cover, with the titleThe Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.[27]
In 2007 Lessing was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature.[31] She received the prize at the age of 88 years 52 days, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third-oldest Nobel laureate in any category (afterLeonid Hurwicz andRaymond Davis Jr.).[32][33] She was only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by theSwedish Academy in its 106-year history.[34] In 2017, just 10 years later, her Nobel medal was put up for auction.[35][36] Previously only one Nobel medal for literature had been sold at auction, forAndré Gide in 2016.[36]
During the late 1990s Lessing had a stroke,[37] which stopped her from travelling during her later years.[38] She was still able to attend the theatre and opera.[37] She began to focus her mind on death, for example asking herself if she would have time to finish a new book.[17][37] She died on 17 November 2013, aged 94, at her home inWest Hampstead, London, of kidney failure,sepsis and a chest infection,[39] predeceased by her two sons, but was survived by her daughter, Jean, who lives in South Africa.[40]
Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases.
During her Communist phase (1944–56) she wrote radically about social issues, a theme to which she returned inThe Good Terrorist (1985). Doris Lessing's first novel,The Grass Is Singing, as well as the short stories later collected inAfrican Stories, are set inSouthern Rhodesia (todayZimbabwe) where she was then living.[43]
This was followed by apsychological phase from 1956 to 1969, including theGolden Notebook and the "Children of Violence" quintet.[44]
Third came theSufi phase, explored in her 70s work, and in theCanopus in Argos sequence of science fiction novels and novellas (or as she preferred to call it "space fiction", a description also preferred byC.S. Lewis forhis works of science fiction) .[45]
TheCanopus in Argos novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution of other worlds, including Earth. UsingSufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher"Idries Shah,[42] the series of novels also uses an approach similar to that employed by the early 20th-century mysticG. I. Gurdjieff in his workAll and Everything. Earlier works of "inner space" fiction likeBriefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) andMemoirs of a Survivor (1974) also connect to this theme. Lessing's interest had turned to Sufism after coming to the realisation that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her disillusioned.[50]
Lessing's novelThe Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars,[51] 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. She also regretted that critics failed to appreciate the exceptional structure of the novel. She explained inWalking in the Shade that she modelled Molly partly on her good friendJoan Rodker, the daughter of the modernist poet and publisherJohn Rodker.[52]
Lessing did not like being pigeonholed as a feminist author. When asked why, she explained:
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.
The Doris Lessing Society is dedicated to supporting the scholarly study of Lessing's work. The formal structure of the Society dates from January 1977, when the first issue of theDoris Lessing Newsletter was published. In 2002 the Newsletter became the academic journalDoris Lessing Studies. The Society also organises panels at theModern Languages Association (MLA) annual Conventions and has held two international conferences inNew Orleans in 2004 andLeeds in 2007.[53]
Lessing's literary archive is held by theHarry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at theUniversity of Texas at Austin. The 76 archival boxes of Lessing's materials at the Ransom Center contain nearly all of her extant manuscripts and typescripts up to 2008. Original material for Lessing's early books is assumed not to exist because she kept none of her early manuscripts.[54] TheMcFarlin Library at theUniversity of Tulsa holds a smaller collection.[55]
TheUniversity of East Anglia's British Archive for Contemporary Writing holds Doris Lessing's personal archive: a vast collection of professional and personal correspondence, including the Whitehorn letters, a collection of love letters from the 1940s, written when Lessing was still living in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The collection also includes forty years of personal diaries. Some of the archive remained embargoed during the writing of Lessing's officialbiography.[56]
^Hajer Elarem, 2015. "A Quest for Selfhood: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Female Identity in Doris Lessing's Early Fiction", academic paper. Université de Franche-Comté.
^Hurwicz won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2007 aged 90. Davis received the 2002 Physics Prize at 88 years 57 days. Their birth dates are shown in their biographies at theNobel Prize website, which states that the awards are given annually on 10 December.
^"Guest of Honor Speech", inWorldcon Guest of Honor Speeches, edited by Mike Resnick and Joe Siclari (Deerfield, IL: ISFIC Press, 2006), p. 192.
^"Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory", Volume 31 ofRoutledge research in postcolonial literatures, Dennis Walder, Taylor & Francis ltd, 2010, p92.ISBN9780203840382.
