
(née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a British
writer
. Her novels include The Grass is Singing
, The Golden Notebook
, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos
.
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature
. She was described by the Swedish Academy
as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize
for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature
.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Literature is analysis after the event.
Laughter is by definition healthy.
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
(née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a British
writer
. Her novels include The Grass is Singing
, The Golden Notebook
, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos
.
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature
. She was described by the Swedish Academy
as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize
for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature
. In 2008, The Times
ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Background
Lessing was born in Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), who were both English and of British nationality. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital
where he was recovering from his amputation
. Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah
, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia
and it was here that Doris was born in 1919. The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe
) in 1925 to farm maize
, when her father purchased around one thousand acre
s of bush. Lessing's mother
attempted to lead an Edwardian lifestyle amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm was not successful and failed to deliver the wealth the Taylers had expected.
Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School
, a Roman Catholic convent
all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare
). She left school aged 14, and thereafter was self-educated; she left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid
. She started reading material on politics
and sociology
that her employer gave her, and began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator
, and she soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John and Jean), before the marriage ended in 1943.
Following her divorce, Lessing was drawn to the community of the Left Book Club
, a communist
book club
which she had joined the year before. It was here that she met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing
. They were married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter), before the marriage also ended in divorce in 1949. Gottfried Lessing later became the East German ambassador to Uganda
, and was murdered in the 1979 rebellion
against Idi Amin Dada.
When she fled to London to pursue her writing career and communist ideals, she left two toddlers with their father in South Africa (another, from her second marriage, went with her). She later said that at the time she thought she had 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."
Writing career
Because of her campaigning against nuclear arms and South African apartheid, Lessing was banned from that country and from Rhodesia for many years. She moved to Londonwith her youngest son in 1949. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing
, was published in 1950. Her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook
, was written in 1962.
In 1984, she attempted to publish two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers, to demonstrate the difficulty new authors faced in trying to break into print. The novels were declined by Lessing's UK publisher, but accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf
. The Diary of a Good Neighbour was published in England and the US in 1983, and If the Old Could in both countries in 1984 http://www.dorislessing.org/ifthe.htmlin, both as written by "Jane Somers." In 1984, both novels were re-published in both countries (Viking Books publishing in the US), this time under one cover, with the title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.
She declined a damehood
, but accepted appointment as a Companion of Honour
at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". She has also been made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature
.
In 2007, Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was 87, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category. She also stands as only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy
in its 106-year history. Lessing was out shopping for groceries when the announcement came, arriving home to tell reporters who had gathered there, "Oh Christ!”. She told reporters outside her home "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush." She titled her Nobel Lecture On Not Winning the Nobel Prize and used it to draw attention to global inequality of opportunity, and to explore changing attitudes to storytelling and literature. The lecture was later published in a limited edition to raise money for children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS
. In a 2008 interview for the BBC
's Front Row
, she stated that increased media interest following the award had left her without time for writing.
Lessing's fiction

theme (1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (to which she returned in The Good Terrorist
[1985]), the psychological
theme (1956–1969), and after that the Sufi
theme, which was explored in the Canopus in Argos
sequence of science fiction
(or as she preferred to put it "space fiction") novels and novella
s.
Lessing's Canopus sequence was not popular with many mainstream literary critics. For example, in the New York Times in 1982 John Leonard
wrote in reference to The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
that "[o]ne of the many sins for which the 20th century will be held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs. Lessing... She now propagandizes on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic razzmatazz." To which Lessing replied: "What they didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like Blood Music, by Greg Bear
. He's a great writer." Unlike some authors primarily known for their mainstream
work, she has never hesitated to admit that she wrote science fiction and attended the 1987
World Science Fiction Convention as its Writer Guest of Honor. Here she made a well-received speech in which she described her dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor
as "an attempt at an autobiography."
When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the Canopus in Argos sequence. These novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution
of other worlds, including Earth. (Similar concepts occur in science fiction by other authors, e.g. the Progressor
and Uplift
sequences.) Using Sufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher" Idries Shah
, the series of novels also owes much to the approach employed by the early 20th century mystic G. I. Gurdjieff
in his work All and Everything
. Earlier works of "inner space" fiction like Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor
(1974) also connect to this theme. Lessing's interest had turned to Sufism after coming to the realization that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her disillusioned.
Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook
is considered a feminist
classic by some scholars, 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 in Walking in the Shade that she modelled Molly partly on her good friend Joan Rodker
, the daughter of the modernist poet and publisher John Rodker
.
Lessing does not like the idea of being pigeonholed as a feminist author. When asked why, she explained:
Archive
Lessing's largest literary archive is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin
. The 45 archival boxes of Lessing's materials at the Ransom Center contain nearly all of her extant manuscripts and typescripts up to 1999. Original material for Lessing's early books is assumed not to exist because she kept none of her early manuscripts. Other institutions, including the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa
, hold smaller collections.
Awards
- Somerset Maugham AwardSomerset Maugham AwardThe Somerset Maugham Award is a British literary prize given each May by the Society of Authors. It is awarded to whom they judge to be the best writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a book published in the past year. The prize was instituted in 1947 by William Somerset Maugham and thus...
(1954) - Prix Médicis étranger (1976)
- Austrian State Prize for European LiteratureAustrian State Prize for European LiteratureThe Austrian State Prize for European Literature , also known as the European Literary Award , is a literary prize in Austria awarded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Art to European writers...
(1981) - Shakespeare-Preis der Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S.Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S.The Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. is a German foundation established in 1931 by the Hamburg merchant Alfred Toepfer. The foundation is committed to promoting European unification and ensuring cultural diversity and understanding between the countries of Europe.- History :The rich industrialist...
, Hamburg (1982) - W. H. Smith Literary Award (1986)
- Palermo Prize (1987)
- Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987)
- Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989)
- James Tait Black Memorial PrizeJames Tait Black Memorial PrizeFounded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
for biography (1995) - Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995)
- Premi Internacional Catalunya (1999)
- Order of the Companions of HonourOrder of the Companions of HonourThe Order of the Companions of Honour is an order of the Commonwealth realms. It was founded by King George V in June 1917, as a reward for outstanding achievements in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion....
(1999) - Companion of Literature of the Royal Society of LiteratureRoyal Society of LiteratureThe Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
(2000) - David Cohen PrizeDavid Cohen PrizeThe David Cohen Prize for Literature is a biennial British literary award given to a writer, novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist or dramatist in recognition of an entire body of work, written in the English language. The prize is funded by the John S. Cohen Foundation and administered by...
(2001) - Premio Príncipe de AsturiasPrince of Asturias AwardsThe Prince of Asturias Awards are a series of annual prizes awarded in Spain by the Prince of Asturias Foundation to individuals, entities or organizations from around the world who make notable achievements in the sciences, humanities, and public affairs....
(2001) - S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002)
- Nobel Prize in LiteratureNobel Prize in LiteratureSince 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
(2007)
Works
Novels- The Grass is SingingThe Grass Is SingingThe Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing. It takes place in Rhodesia , in southern Africa, during the 1940s and deals with the racial politics between whites and blacks in that country...
(1950) - Retreat to Innocence (1956)
- The Golden NotebookThe Golden NotebookThe Golden Notebook is a 1962 novel by Doris Lessing. This book, as well as the couple that followed it, enters the realm of what Margaret Drabble in The Oxford Companion to English Literature has called Lessing's "inner space fiction", her work that explores mental and societal breakdown...
(1962) - Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)
- The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
- Memoirs of a SurvivorMemoirs of a SurvivorThe Memoirs of a Survivor is a dystopian novel by Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing. It was first published in 1974 by Octagon Press. It was made into a film in 1981, starring Julie Christie and Nigel Hawthorne, and directed by David Gladwell.-Plot:...
(1974) - The Diary of a Good Neighbour (as Jane Somers, 1983)
- If the Old Could... (as Jane Somers, 1984)
- The Good TerroristThe Good TerroristThe Good Terrorist is a 1985 novel by Doris Lessing. The story examines the events in the life of a well-intentioned squatter, Alice, who is drawn into organizing acts of violence.-Main characters:...
(1985) - The Fifth ChildThe Fifth ChildThe Fifth Child is a novel by Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988, and since translated into a number of languages...
(1988) - Love, Again (1996)
- Mara and Dann (1999)
- Ben, in the World (2000) – sequel to The Fifth Child
- The Sweetest DreamThe Sweetest DreamThe Sweetest Dream is a 2001 novel by British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. The novel begins in the 1960s leading up to the 1980s and is set in London and the fictional African nation, Zimlia, a thinly veiled reference to Zimbabwe....
(2001) - The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) – sequel to Mara and Dann
- The CleftThe CleftThe Cleft is a novel by Doris Lessing.-Plot summary:The story is narrated by a Roman historian, during the time of the Emperor Nero. He tells the story as a secret history of humanity's beginnings, as pieced together from scraps of documents and oral histories, passed down through the...
(2007) - Alfred and EmilyAlfred and EmilyAlfred and Emily is a 2008 part fiction, part memoir book by British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing . The story is structured in two parts and is based on the lives of Lessing's parents. The first is a novella, a fictional portrait of how her parents lives would have been without...
(2008)
The Children of Violence series
- Martha Quest (1952)
- A Proper Marriage (1954)
- A Ripple from the Storm (1958)
- Landlocked (1965)
- The Four-Gated CityThe Four-Gated CityThe Four-Gated City is a novel, published in 1969, by British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing. It concludes the five-volume series Children of Violence, a literary achievement which took nearly twenty years. The Four-Gated City is sometimes regarded as one of Lessing's most important works...
(1969)
The Canopus in Argos: Archives
series
- ShikastaShikastaRe: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta is a 1979 science fiction novel by British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing, and is the first book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series. It was first published in the United States in October 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf, and in the United Kingdom in...
(1979) - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and FiveThe Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and FiveThe Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is a 1980 science fiction novel by Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. It is the second book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series....
(1980) - The Sirian ExperimentsThe Sirian ExperimentsThe Sirian Experiments is a 1980 science fiction novel by Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. It is the third book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series and continues the story of Earth's evolution, which has been manipulated from the beginning by advanced extraterrestrial...
(1980) - The Making of the Representative for Planet 8The Making of the Representative for Planet 8The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 is a 1982 science fiction novel by Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. It is the fourth book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series and relates the fate of a planet, under the care of the benevolent galactic empire Canopus, that is plunged...
(1982) - The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen EmpireThe Sentimental Agents in the Volyen EmpireThe Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire is a 1983 science fiction novel by Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing...
(1983)
Opera libretti
- The Making of the Representative for Planet 8The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 (opera)The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 is a full-scale opera by Philip Glass with a libretto by Doris Lessing.The opera was co-commissioned by English National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam and Theater Kiel, and co-produced with Artpark, Lewiston, New York...
(music by Philip GlassPhilip GlassPhilip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
, 1986) - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (music by Philip Glass, 1997)
Comics
- Playing the Game (graphic novelGraphic novelA graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
illustrated by Charlie AdlardCharlie AdlardCharles "Charlie" Adlard is a British comic book artist and penciller.He is best known for providing art on The Walking Dead and Savage.-Biography:...
, 1995)
Drama
- Each His Own Wilderness (three plays, 1959)
- Play with a Tiger (1962)
Poetry
- Fourteen Poems (1959)
- The Wolf People - INPOPA Anthology 2002 (poems by Lessing, Robert Twigger and T.H. Benson, 2002)
Short story collections
- Five Short Novels (1953)
- The Habit of Loving (1957)
- A Man and Two Women (1963)
- African Stories (1964)
- Winter in July (1966)
- The Black Madonna (1966)
- The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972)
- This Was the Old Chief's Country: Collected African Stories, Vol. 1 (1973)
- The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories, Vol. 2 (1973)
- To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, Vol. 1 (1978)
- The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories, Vol. 2 (1978)
- Through the TunnelThrough the Tunnel"Through the Tunnel" is a short story written by Doris Lessing, originally published in The New Yorker in 1955.-Plot:Jerry, a young English boy, and his mother are vacationing at a beach they have come to many times in years past. Though the beach’s location is not given, it is implied to be in a...
(1990) - London Observed: Stories and Sketches (1992)
- The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (1992)
- Spies I Have Known (1995)
- The Pit (1996)
- The Grandmothers: Four Short NovelsThe Grandmothers: Four Short NovelsThe Grandmothers: Four Short Novels is collection of four short stories published in 2003 by 2007 Nobel laureate Doris Lessing.-The Grandmothers:...
(2003)
Cat Tales
- Particularly Cats (stories and nonfiction, 1967)
- Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor (stories and nonfiction, 1993)
- The Old Age of El Magnifico (stories and nonfiction, 2000)
- On Cats (2002) – omnibus edition containing the above three books
Autobiography and memoirs
- Going Home (memoir, 1957)
- African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (memoir, 1992)
- Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949Under My Skin (book)Under My Skin: Volume I of my Autobiography, to 1949 was the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, covering the period of her life from birth in 1919 to leaving Zimbabwe in 1949....
(1994) - Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 to 1962 (1997)
Other nonfiction
- In Pursuit of the English (1960)
- Prisons We Choose to Live InsidePrisons We Choose to Live InsidePrisons We Choose to Live Inside is a collection of five essays by Doris Lessing which were previously delivered as the 1985 Massey Lectures.-The Essays:...
(essays, 1987) - The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987)
- A Small Personal Voice (essays, 1994)
- Conversations (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1994)
- Putting the Questions Differently (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1996)
- Time Bites (essays, 2004)
- On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (Nobel Lecture, 2007, published 2008)
See also
- Whites in ZimbabweWhites in ZimbabweWhite Zimbabweans are people from the southern African country Zimbabwe who identify themselves as white...
- List of female Nobel laureates
External links
- Doris Lessing homepage created by Jan HanfordJan HanfordJan Hanford is a composer/musician who plays piano, harpsichord and synthesizers. Her electronica has been released under the name Human Response....
- Lessing Nobel Prize Lecture
- Doris Lessing tells her life story (video)
- Joyce Carol Oates on Doris Lessing
- Doris Lessing's papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin
- Doris Lessing Archive, University of East Anglia
- University of Tulsa McFarlin Library's inventory of Doris Lessing manuscripts housed in Special Collections
- Doris Lessing Page at Guardian Unlimited contains links to all available articles and reviews by Lessing to appear at Guardian Unlimited, including audio, streaming video, and interviews, and additional articles focusing on Lessing from other writers
- British Author, Doris Lessing, bags 2007 Nobel Literature Prize
- Articles by Doris Lessing on the 5th Estate blog
- Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and 'Space Fiction'
- The modern child and Romantic monstrosity in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child An article by Camille François
- Lessing's childhood home in Zimbabwe