69 Author Introduction: Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iraq), where her father worked
as a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia. In
1925, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe) to take up maize farming.
Lessing was educated first at a convent
school then at the Dominican Convent High
School, an all-girls high school in Salisbury,
from which she dropped out at the age of
thirteen. From that point on, she became
an autodidact, reading books ordered from
London, by authors such as Dickens, D. H.
Lawrence, and Woolf. She was also shaped
by her mother’s constant pressure for British
propriety and conventionality and her
father’s bitter accounts of WWI.
At the age of fifteen, Lessing left home
to work as a nursemaid and started writing
professionally. After moving to Salisbury, she
worked as a telephone operator and married Frank Wisdom; they had two children.
Oppressed by the institution of marriage, into which she felt that women sank
and disappeared, Lessing left her family but continued to live in Salisbury. Her
Image 3.13 | Photo of Doris Lessing
Photographer | Elke Wetzig
Source | Wikimedia Commons
License | CC BY-SA 3.0
Page | 1109
BRITISH LITERATURE II THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND
interest in politics drew her to Communism and Socialism. She joined the Left
Book Club and married one of its members, Gottfried Lessing; the two had a son.
In 1949, she left this marriage and moved to London, taking her youngest son
Peter with her. There, she pursued her writing and published her novel The Grass
is Singing (1950), an account of a white couple in southern Africa who struggle at
farming, their black servant Moses, and the overt, often cruel racism of the whites
against the blacks. The physical and mental deterioration of the wife, Mary Turner,
particularly highlights the artificiality and hypocrisy of the “colour bar.”
Lessing continued to use her experiences in and views of Africa, particularly her
opposition to apartheid, as material for her writing, through which she developed
her views on politics, cultural clashes, and racial and gender inequalities. The act
of writing allowed her to distance herself from cultural and social pressures that
coercively shape the individual and to explore identity and the individual’s place in
society. In a series of psychological novels, The Children of Violence (1952-1969),
she followed the developing consciousness of Martha Quest and the dystopian
future of England. Her The Golden Notebook (1962) manifested the multiple and
multivalent selves of a single woman resisting the pressures and repressions of
her society with the force and freedom of a man. The book uses a postmodern,
achronological structure that intersects “realistic” narrative with journal entries
recording external and internal events. Although playful and even absurdist, the
book considers themes of continuing relevance, including societal fragmentation,
the threat of nuclear destruction, and women’s struggle for physical, emotional,
and mental integrity in a society that often denies them any such integrity at all,
let alone autonomy.
Lessing continued to write until the end of her life, employing various genres,
including science fiction and opera, as well as diverse personas (for instance,
writing under the pseudonym of Jane Somers). In 2007, she won the Novel Prize
for Literature.

Source: Robinson, Bonnie. British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond. CC-BY-SA