Doris Lessing

Born in what is now Iran to a British imperial clerk and the nurse who cared for him after he lost a leg in World War I, Doris Lessing grew up on a farm in the colony of Southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. She went to a girls’ school in the capital of Salisbury (now Harare) until dropping out at age 13—she never returned to school, but she pursued her education independently, reading extensively during her teen years. Lessing escaped her miserable home to become a nursemaid and telephone operator. During this time, she published a few stories in colonial magazines, and wrote and destroyed two novel manuscripts. After pursuing unfruitful relationships out of her self-described “fever of erotic longing,” Lessing married at 19 and had two children. Dissatisfied, she soon left her new family to spend her free time in discussion with the Left Book Club, where she met her next husband, the German communist exile Gottfried Lessing. (In The Golden Notebook, protagonist Anna Wulf fictionalizes this portion of Lessing’s life in her black notebook.) In 1949, Doris Lessing divorced Gottfried Lessing and brought their young son to London; soon thereafter, she published her first novel, The Grass is Singing. In the next decade, she continued to write fiction based on her upbringing in Africa and participate in left-wing politics; although she gave up communism in 1954, South Africa and her homeland of Southern Rhodesia both banned her from returning in 1956. Lessing’s work took a psychological turn in the 1960s; in 1962, she published The Golden Notebook, which remains her most celebrated work. In the 1970s and 1980s Lessing began exploring science fiction and Sufi mystical themes, and in the following decades she expanded into other genres, writing opera libretti for composer Philip Glass and a two-volume autobiography. In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power” at the age of 88, although she was reportedly first considered for the Prize in the 1980s and responded to the news of her award by insisting that she “couldn’t care less.”