Doris Lessing

Writer

• Born: October 22, 1919
• Birthplace: Kermānshāh, Persia (now Bākhtarān, Iran)
• Died: November 17, 2013
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

Doris Lessing was one of the best known British novelists of her generation. Born Doris May Taylor, her parents were Alfred Cook Taylor, an English bank clerk, and Emily Maude McVeagh, his wartime nurse. The couple emigrated to Persia (later Iran) shortly after World War I, and in 1925 they moved with their daughter and younger son, Harry, to a farm in southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). The family was always poor. The father, whose leg had been amputated, was a dreamer who became a cynic, and the mother was domineering but ineffective. They were socially and physically isolated, surrounded by the open veld. Lessing attended a Catholic school in Salisbury but left in 1933 because of eye problems; after her formal schooling ended at age fourteen, she continued reading voraciously. {$S[A]Somers, Jane;Lessing, Doris}

In 1938, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work in various jobs and to begin writing. She married Frank Charles Wisdom in 1939, had a son and a daughter, and was divorced in 1943. Two years later, she married Gottfried Lessing; they had a son and were divorced in 1949. Much of her work deals with the Africa of her youth and young adulthood. Lessing moved to London, England, in 1949 and published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which shows her concern for racial issues and the plight of women. The book was a great success. It was reprinted seven times within five months of its publication, setting the pattern of widespread sales for nearly all of her subsequent works.

Lessing continued to live in London, though she traveled widely, as suggested in both her fiction and nonfiction, and her writing continued steadily. She was briefly a member of the Communist Party but left it officially in 1956. In the late 1950s, she participated in mass demonstrations for nuclear disarmament and was a speaker at the first Aldermaston March in 1958. During the early 1960s Lessing also worked in the theater, helping to establish Centre 42, a populist arts program, and writing her own plays.

In the late 1960s, Lessing’s thinking was influenced by the mystical teachings of Sufism, which emphasizes conscious evolution of the mind in harmony with self and others. The relationship between the individual and the collective was a major Lessing theme. Her works present a sense of urgency, of the need for change in both individual consciousness and social harmony. The human race knows better than it acts, Lessing always suggests, and human beings must learn to live together in greater social concord. This central theme appears not only in her realistic works such as the Children of Violence series (which includes Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, and The Four-Gated City) and The Golden Notebook but also in what she called “space fiction,” works such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Memoirs of a Survivor, and the five-novel Canopus in Argos series.

The Golden Notebook established Lessing’s reputation worldwide. Its form is complex and innovative, as it interweaves the personal story of Anna Wulf, a novelist, with the fragmentation and disharmony of the modern world. In 1986, the Modern Language Association officially recognized the novel as a “masterpiece of world literature.”

After the Argos science-fiction series, Lessing returned to realism in The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could . . . , two novels about old age which she published under the pseudonym Jane Somers. Lessing said she wanted to demonstrate the difficulties beginning writers have, and indeed the manuscripts were rejected by several publishers; Lessing also said she wanted the works to be judged on their own merit, apart from the Lessing canon. In 1984, Lessing acknowledged her authorship, and the works were reprinted in one volume entitled The Diaries of Jane Somers. Lessing’s output slowed down considerably after the 1980s, but she continued her political activism. In 1992, she released The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, and she launched a multivolume autobiography with the 1994 publication of Under My Skin, a creative exploration of her experience.

After publishing relatively little in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lessing picked up her literary pace beginning with Love, Again, an exploration of love and sexuality as experienced by a sixty-five-year-old woman, a meditation on the relationships between love and aging. In Mara and Dann Lessing returns to her science-fiction interests, setting her novel thousands of years in the future during a new Ice Age. The themes and subject matter, however, are very similar to her depiction of the very beginning of the human race in Shikasta. Ben, in the World revives the main character of her 1988 novel The Fifth Child, depicting this “abnormal” child’s encounter with the outside world at the age of eighteen. The Sweetest Dream is a realistic novel tracing the lives of a large group of people initially drawn together in the 1960s by the charismatic presence of Johnny Lennox, an English Communist activist. It is his former wife Frances, however, who provides the center of gravity in a household composed of intellectuals, students, and visiting Africans.

Lessing repeatedly astounded with the variety of writing forms she explored as well as her sheer productivity. Some critics complain about her style, noting that her rambling, questioning sentences seldom seem finely crafted, but others see this as a further indication of her didactic nature, a sense that she had messages which the world must hear. Lessing sought out and reached a wide readership. Her works have been translated into many languages and have been reviewed by critics of many nationalities. Dee Seligman notes in Doris Lessing: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1981) that Lessing provided “a distinctly humanistic voice” for the second half of the twentieth century; her topics reflect major contemporary issues such as racism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, madness, extrasensory perception, and mysticism. She wrote not only about the historical past and present but also about the imagined future. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose in Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival (1988) refer to Lessing as an “alchemical writer,” one who perhaps more than any other major writer of the twentieth century “challenges her readers and changes them; alters their consciousness; radicalizes their sexual, personal, and global politics.” Lessing’s exploration of philosophical questions through the medium of female experience had an enormous impact on other creative writers as well as on readers and critics, and direct references to Lessing appear in many contemporary novels. Composer Philip Glass even produced an opera based on her science fiction in 1988.

Lessing returned to the characters and world of Mara and Dann with a sequel published in 2005, The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. In 2007, she wrote and published her last full-length novel, The Cleft, a unique tale of humanity's beginnings. That same year, she was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the oldest recipient and only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Alfred and Emily (2008), a work that is half novella and half nonfiction, she further explored her parents' relationship by first creating an alternative, fictional account and then providing the actual account in the second half.

Lessing died at her home in London on November 17, 2013, at the age of ninety-four.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Grass Is Singing, 1950

Martha Quest, 1952

A Proper Marriage, 1954

Retreat to Innocence, 1956

A Ripple from the Storm, 1958

The Golden Notebook, 1962

Landlocked, 1965, 1991

The Four-Gated City, 1969

Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971

The Summer Before the Dark, 1973

The Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974

Shikasta, 1979

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, 1980

The Sirian Experiments, 1981

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 1982

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, 1983

The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 (as Jane Somers)

If the Old Could . . . , 1984 (as Somers)

The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1984 (includes The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could . . .)

The Good Terrorist, 1985

The Fifth Child, 1988

Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1992 (5 novel cycle includes Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, The Sirian Experiments, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire)

Playing the Game, 1995

Love, Again, 1996

Mara and Dann, 1999

Ben, in the World, 2000

The Sweetest Dream, 2001

The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, 2005

The Cleft, 2007

Short Fiction:

This Was the Old Chief’s Country, 1951

Five: Short Novels, 1953

The Habit of Loving, 1957

A Man and Two Women, 1963

African Stories, 1964

The Temptation of Jack Orkney, and Other Stories, 1972 (also known as The Story of a Non-Marrying Man, and Other Stories)

This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Volume 1 of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, 1973

The Sun Between Their Feet: Volume 2 of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, 1973

Sunrise on the Veld, 1975

A Mild Attack of Locusts, 1977

Collected Stories, 1978 (2 volumes; also known as Stories, 1978)

London Observed: Stories and Sketches, 1991 (also known as The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, 1992)

Spies I Have Known, and Other Stories, 1995

The Old Age of El Magnifico, 2000

The Grandmothers, 2003

Drama:

Each His Own Wilderness, pr. 1958

Play with a Tiger, pr., pb. 1962

Making of the Representative for Planet 8, pr. 1988 (libretto)

Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays, pb. 1996

Poetry:

Fourteen Poems, 1959

Nonfiction:

Going Home, 1957

In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary, 1960

Particularly Cats, 1967

A Small Personal Voice, 1974

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 1987

The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 1987

African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe, 1992

Under My Skin, 1994

A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, 1994

Doris Lessing: Conversations, 1994 (also known as Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994, 1996)

Shadows on the Wall of the Cave, 1994

Walking in the Shade, 1997

Time Bites: Views and Reviews, 2004

Miscellaneous:

The Doris Lessing Reader, 1988 (selections)

Alfred and Emily, 2008

Bibliography

Athill, Diana, et. al. "Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, 50 Years On." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 6 Apr. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/06/the-golden-notebook-50-years-on. Accessed 31 Mar. 2016. Four writers reflect on their impressions of The Golden Notebook decades after its publication.

Brewster, Dorothy. Doris Lessing. New York: Twayne, 1965. The first book-length study of the fiction. Provides a good general overview of Lessing’s work up to the fourth novel in the Children of Violence series, Landlocked. Includes a brief biography and a discussion of the early novels, including The Golden Notebook, a chapter on the short fiction, which analyzes stories published up to 1964, and a concluding chapter on attitudes and influences. Select bibliography, index, and chronology.

Butcher, Margaret. “‘Two Forks of a Road’: Divergence and Convergence in the Short Stories of Doris Lessing.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 55–61. Asserts that “Homage to Isaac Babel” provides a rebuttal that Lessing’s later stories move away from her earlier larger concerns with moral and political issues and retreat into a feminine world of social satire. In her appreciation of Babel’s detachment and control, Lessing has at last learned that mannerism and a directness in writing are neither mutually exclusive nor antithetical.

Fishburn, Katherine. The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in Narrative Technique. Westport: Greenwood, 1985. This study considers Lessing’s science fiction from Briefing for a Descent into Hell through the Canopus in Argos series. It argues that the science fiction has the purpose of transforming reality and involving the reader in ideas and the intricacies of the texts rather than in characterization. Fishburn also published Doris Lessing: Life, Work, and Criticism (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: York Press, 1987), which provides a brief overview of Lessing’s life and works, including literary biography, critical response, and an annotated bibliography.

Galen, Muge. Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. This text applies the ideas of Sufism and its influence on Lessing and her novels. An introduction to Sufism and to Doris Lessing is included to help the reader understand the basic ideas of Sufism. Emphasis is placed on her space-fiction utopias as an alternative to the current Western lifestyles.

Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. U of Michigan P, 1997. Greene centers this study on how Lessing’s novels are concerned with change. Several different critical approaches to Lessing’s works, including Marxist, feminist, and Jungian, are included in the study.

Halisky, Linda H. “Redeeming the Irrational: The Inexplicable Heroines of ‘A Sorrowful Woman’ and ‘To Room Nineteen.’” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Winter, 1990): 45–54. Argues that the heroine of “To Room Nineteen” is inexplicable only if one is locked into a belief that reason is the only integrating, sense-making force. Discusses the redemptive force of mythic truth in the story.

Harris, Jocelyn. “Doris Lessing’s Beautiful Impossible Blueprints.” In The British and Irish Novel Since 1960, edited by James Acheson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. A discussion of Lessing’s discarding of political and social blueprints such as Marxism and sentimental idealism about the brotherhood of man and her moving in her later fiction to mystical solutions and interventions.

Klein, Carole. Doris Lessing: A Biography. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000. An unauthorized biography that nonetheless draws on extensive interviews with Lessing’s friends and colleagues. Klein draws many connections between events in Lessing’s life and episodes in her novels.

Lessing, Doris. A Small Personal Voice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. This collection of interviews and essays by Lessing gives the reader an insight into the novelist’s constantly expanding consciousness and agenda.

Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. An interesting collection of essays that look at spiritual themes in Lessing’s work, touching on both the realistic and the science-fiction novels.

Pickering, Jean. Understanding Doris Lessing. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1990. A brief, clear overview of Lessing’s work. Begins with a chapter providing a biographical and analytical look at Lessing’s career, then continues with a short but sharp analysis of her fiction through The Fifth Child (1988). Includes an index and an annotated bibliography of books and articles about Lessing.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. New York: Knopf, 2000. Evocative, interpretive essays on the life paths and works of twelve women, including Lessing, connecting the circumstances of their lives with the shapes, styles, subjects, and situations of their art.

Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 1991. A chapter of this book is devoted to Lessing and her works. Primary focus is placed on the Children of Violence series: Martha Quest, The Four-Gated City, Landlocked, A Proper Marriage, and A Ripple from the Storm. Robinson focuses on Lessing’s desire to present a humanist view in her characters and themes and how the female main characters tend to create contradictions when trying to reach their goals.

Sage, Lorna. "Doris Lessing Obituary." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 17 Nov. 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessing. Accessed 31 Mar. 2016. Obituary covering Lessing's life and work.

Thorpe, Michael. Doris Lessing. Essex: Longman, 1973. A good general introduction that is very thorough, including a select bibliography, with an emphasis on the short fiction. Although only thirty-five pages in length, this volume includes a biography, discussion of Lessing’s life and attitudes, and a sociopolitical analysis.

Tyler, Lisa. “Our Mothers’ Gardens: Doris Lessing’s ‘Among the Roses.’” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Spring, 1994): 163–173. Examines the mother-daughter relationship in Lessing’s short story “Among the Roses”; argues that the breach between mother and daughter suggests a division between two worlds—one of female community and another of heterosexuality.

Whittaker, Ruth. Doris Lessing. New York: St. Martin, 1988. A short but excellent overview of the fiction through The Good Terrorist. Ideal for a first reader of Lessing or to clarify points for those familiar with her work. Includes background and influences, the colonial legacy, in-depth analysis, an index, and a select bibliography that lists all Lessing’s work and the major books, articles, and interviews published to 1988. Also includes reference to the Doris Lessing Newsletter, published by the Brooklyn College Press.

Yelin, Louise. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1998. The section on Lessing focuses on the process of her “Englishing” after leaving Rhodesia.