A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Doris Lessing (born Doris May Taylor in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), on 22 October 1919) is a Nobel Prize winning British writer, author of works such as the novel The Golden Notebook. Central themes in Lessing's works are feminism, the battle of the sexes, individuals in search of wholeness, and the dangers of technological and scientific hubris. A short story writer and novelist, as well as essayist and critic, Lessing was deeply concerned with the cultural inequities of her native land. The heroines who populate the work of Doris Lessing belong to the avant garde of their day. Leftist, fiercely independent, feminist, her characters, like Lessing herself, are social critics rebelling against the cultural restrictions of their societies. And like their creator, Lessing's heroines populate two geographies: Southern Africa and England. Lessing's fiction closely parallels her own life. Lessing was born 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. In 1925 the family moved to a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), 100 miles west of Mozambique, hoping to improve their income. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian life style amongst the rough environment. The farm was not successful and failed to deliver the wealth Lessing's parents had expected. Lessing grew up with her younger brother Harry. Her childhood was lonely, the nearest neighbours were miles away and there was no real roads between the farms. Lessing described her childhood on the farm in the first part of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). At the age of seven, she was sent to a convent boarding school but later moved to a girls' school in Salisbury. Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare). Lessing left school aged 13, and after that, was self-educated, mostly with the reading of the major nineteenth-century Russian, French, and English novelists. She left home aged 15 and worked as a nursemaid, and it was around this time that Lessing would start reading material on politics and sociology that her employer gave her to read. She began writing around this time. During 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator. In 1939 she married Frank Charles Wisdom with whom she had a son, John, and a daughter, Jean. The couple divorced in 1943. Following her divorce, Lessing was drawn to the Left Book Club, a socialist book club, and it was here that she met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. In 1945 Doris married Gottfried Lessing, a German-Jewish immigrant she had met in a Marxist group mainly concerned with the race issue. She became involved with the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party. She and Gottfried had a son, Peter. Gottfried Lessing became later the German ambassador to Uganda; he and his third wife were murdered in the 1979 revolt against Idi Amin. This period of her life is reflected in A ripple from the storm (1958) of the five-volume sequence Children of the Violence, the first four of which were set in a fictional African colony, Zambesia. When the couple divorced in 1949, she moved to London with her youngest son and the manuscript of her first book, The Grass Is Singing, in hand. The book, a chronicle of life in Africa which took its title from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, was published the following year (1950) and was immediately well received. In The Grass is Singing Lessing examines the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. The book is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts. Between 1952 and 1956 she was a member of the British Communist Party and was active in the campaign against nuclear weapons. Because of her criticism of the South African regime, she was prohibited entry to that country between 1956 and 1995. After a brief visit to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she was banned there as well for the same reason. In African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992) she described going back in 1982 to the country where she had grown up. Disillusioned with Communist policies in England, Lessing left the party in the mid-1950s. She underwent Jungian analysis and also studied Sufism under the guidance of Idres Shah. In 1979 Lessing set up a Sufi Trust for one hundred thousand dollars. Even the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, usually called the Martha Quest series for its main character, is largely set in Africa. The series comprises Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969). It describes Martha Quest's awakening to greater awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman.The Children of Violence, despite its emphatic liberation theme, is characterised by an almost fatalistic outlook. The story is told with the mild despair of someone seeing her younger self from the heavens of an afterlife, unable to intervene. The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. The story deals with the personal crisis of a writer, Anna Wulf, who keeps four notebooks while working on her fictional novel 'Free Women'. The 'yellow notebook' portrays Anna's alter ego, the 'red' is a political document, the 'blue' is a diary, and the 'black' is about Anna's earlier life. In the final section Anna gives the 'golden notebook' to her American lover. The 'Free Woman' narrative ends with Anna's acceptance that she cannot capture the absolute truth about herself in her notebooks. Books published in the 1970s included Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), inspired by R. D. Laing. In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing expanded the science fiction genre. The series studies the post-atomic war development of the human species. Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles. Among inspirations for the work was the Idries Shah’s school of Sufism that she discovered in the 1960s. Doris Lessing revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004) collection of essays. Lessing returned to realistic narrative in The Good Terrorist (1985), providing a satirical picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonist’s misdirected martyrdom and subjugation. In this book Lessingexamined with irony a militant left-wing life style and the short distance between idealism and terrorism. The autobiographical Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) represented a new peak in her writing. Lessing recalls not only her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the empire. Her novel The Sweetest Dream (2001) is a stand-alone sequel in fictive form. Perhaps her unsparing view of the polical antics of friends and lovers necessitated such discretion. Her other important novels are The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988). In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a woman finally about to fulfil her gift and sexual desires. After a first reading, the contours of the real novel take shape: a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. The Fifth Child, a mixture of genres from mythology to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is a masterfully realised psychological thriller, where a woman’s repressed or denied aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child. The vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life has had special appeal for Doris Lessing. It reappears in some of her books of recent years: the fantasy novel Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005). From collapse and chaos emerge the elementary qualities that allow Lessing to retain hope in humanity. Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme (1944-1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (and returned to in The Good Terrorist (1985)), the psychological theme (1956-1969), and after that the Sufi theme, which was explored in a science fiction setitbusng in the Canopus series. Her novel The Golden Notebook was Lessing's most ambitious and perhaps her most misunderstood book. Taken by critics as a latter-day tract on feminism, but notably not by the author herself, the book does have a layer of feminist philosophy. But at its core, The Golden Notebook has more to do with the rights of the individual in a society than with the role of women. The Golden Notebook is a carefully constructed work that builds on a short novel called Free Women. The main character of Free Women, Anna Wulf, a writer keeps a series of notebooks--black, red, yellow, and blue--which punctuate the novel. In effect, the heroine of Free Women steps out of the novel to comment on its action. The whole--Free Women and the notebooks--becomes The Golden Notebook. When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the Canopus in Argos series. These books show, from many different perspectives, an advanced society's efforts at Forced evolution. The Canopus series is based partly on Sufi concepts, to which Lessing was introduced by Idries Shah. Earlier works of "inner space" fiction like Briefing for a Descent into Hell and Memoirs of a Survivor also connect to this theme. While Lessing was also prolific in producing non-fiction, it is in her fiction that she made her strongest statements. Her writing borders on the autobiographical. Her fictional accounts of Africa and England bear a strong resemblance to her own life, and the heroines of her novels greatly resemble each other and their creator. Her books all deal with the same themes: the problem of racism in British colonial Africa and the place of women in a male-dominated world and their escape from the social and sexual repression of that world. These are the themes of Lessing's life as well as her work. Lessing also did some nonfiction work: In Pursuit of the English (1961) about her youth in London, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), a collection of lectures, and The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987), which described in detail the sufferings of Afghan refugees from the Soviet invasion of their country. Another example was African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe where she deplored the destruction of wildlife and the environment in that country, and criticized the narrow-mindedness of many of the minority white community there. Under My Skin (1994), the first of a proposed three-volume autobiography, follows Lessing from her birth in 1919 to 1949, the year she left Southern Rhodesia for London and her life as a single mother and aspiring writer. Walking in the Shade (1997), the second volume of the autobiography, covers Lessing's life in London from her arrival in the to the publication in 1962 of The Golden Notebook, which secured her reputation as a major post-war English writer. Apart from this, she has also written several short stories about cats, which are her favourite animals. Distinguished for its energy and intelligence, her work is principally concerned with the lives of women—their psychology, politics, work, relationship to men and to their children, and their change of vision as they age. In her later books she has mainly focused on efforts by individuals to resist society’s pressures toward marginalization and acculturation. |
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