Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing: The Novelist Who Refused Her Own Movement

She left school at thirteen and read her way to a Nobel Prize. When the Swedish Academy called in 2007 she was eighty-seven, the oldest laureate in the prize's history to that point, and the news reached her on a London pavement as she climbed out of a taxi with her shopping. The Academy called her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." Lessing had spent forty-five years telling readers that scrutiny was the point and that the female experience was only part of it.

Persia and the Veld

She was born Doris May Tayler on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, in Persia, where her father was working. Captain Alfred Tayler had lost a leg in the First World War; her mother was Emily Maude Tayler. The family lived in Persia until Doris was six, and in 1925 moved to Southern Rhodesia to farm. The farm did not prosper. What it did supply was space, isolation, and the spectacle of a colonial racial order operating at close range on a child who was paying attention.

A Self-Education

She was sent to the Dominican Convent High School and then to the Girls High School in Salisbury, and she walked out of formal schooling at thirteen. Everything after that she taught herself, ordering books from London and reading through the nineteenth-century novelists and the political literature of the day. The gap is worth registering: one of the century's major novelists never sat an examination in literature.

Marriage came early and twice. She married Frank Wisdom in 1939 and left him in 1943; they had two children, John, born in 1940, and Jean, born in 1941. In 1946 she married Gottfried Lessing, a fellow radical, and the marriage ended in 1949; their son Peter was born in 1946. She kept the surname and never married again.

The Grass Is Singing

In 1950 she published *The Grass Is Singing*, the story of a white farmer's wife in Rhodesia and her fatal entanglement with a black servant. It arrived as something new: a novel about southern Africa written from inside the settler class that refused to flatter it, treating the colour bar as a machine for producing madness in everyone it touched. The book made her reputation immediately. It also made her an enemy of two governments; her opposition to apartheid saw her banned from both South Africa and Rhodesia.

The Golden Notebook

Her breakthrough came in 1962 with *The Golden Notebook*. Its heroine, Anna Wulf, keeps four separate notebooks — for her African past, her communist politics, her fiction, her private life — because she cannot make the pieces cohere, and the novel's structure enacts that fragmentation rather than describing it. Readers seized on it as a manifesto for women's liberation. Lessing, who had written a book about breakdown and the impossibility of wholeness in a divided civilisation, spent decades objecting to the reduction. Her impatience with the demand was blunt: "What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness."

Three Phases

More than fifty novels followed, and critics generally divide the output into three movements. The communist phase ran from 1944 to 1956, the years of party membership and social realism. The psychological phase, roughly 1956 to 1969, turned inward to madness, breakdown and the boundaries of the self. From the 1970s came the Sufi phase, after Lessing concluded that Marxism had nothing to say about the inner life. Its most ambitious product was *Canopus in Argos*, a sequence of five novels published between 1979 and 1983 that recast human history as an experiment run by galactic empires — space fiction written in earnest by a writer at the height of her literary standing, and dismissed by many of the same critics who had crowned her.

Politics

She had joined the Communist Party and stayed until 1956, leaving after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, as a generation of Western intellectuals did. Her activism did not end with the party card: she campaigned for nuclear disarmament and remained a public opponent of the southern African regimes that had barred her. The scepticism ran in every direction, including at her own former convictions, which is why her later work reads less as a set of positions than as an interrogation of how people come to hold any position at all.

Recognition

She declined a damehood in 1992 and accepted the Companion of Honour in 1999. The David Cohen Prize came in 2001 for a lifetime's achievement in British literature, and international awards accumulated for decades before Stockholm finally moved in 2007. She died on 17 November 2013 at her home in West Hampstead, London, aged ninety-four, of kidney failure, sepsis and a chest infection. Her son Peter had died earlier the same year; her son John in 1992.

Why Lessing Matters

She wrote the book that a movement adopted and then refused to be owned by it, which tells you most of what matters about her. Lessing moved through communism, psychoanalysis, Sufism and science fiction not as a dilettante but as someone testing each system for whether it could account for a life, and reporting honestly when it could not. *The Grass Is Singing* changed what a colonial novel could say; *The Golden Notebook* changed what a novel about a woman could look like on the page. The self-taught farm girl from Southern Rhodesia turned out to be the most restless intelligence in postwar British fiction.