© Opale

Doris LESSING

Nobel Prize 2007

 

« that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"

 

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler on the 22nd of October 1919 in Iran. Her parents were both English. Her father, a bank employee, returned from World War One an amputee. He had become a Captain in the army. His mother, a nurse, lost the man she once loved to this experience, which Lessing would refer to as a sort of ‘poison’ that inflected all of her father’s recollections.

When Doris was six years old, her family moved in Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) a former English colony, lured by the promise of riches to be earnt from farming corn, tobacco and cereals.

Doris would retain the memory of a childhood split between the pain of the strict, disciplined education imposed upon her by her mother, and moments of happiness spent in the company of her brother Harry, with whom she discovered the joys of the natural world. In constant conflict with her mother, Doris managed to escape her stranglehold at the age of 15, finding a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read. Frustrated by her few romantic adventures, she began to write romantic fantasies, and then stories. She sold two of these to South African magazines.

At the age of 18, she moved to Salisbury and worked as a telephone operator. A year later she married Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children. A few years later, feeling oppressed by the situation, she left them. Quickly after she met and married Gottfried Lessing. Together they had a son.

At the age of 36 she moved to London with her son. At this point her career as a writer began.

Acclaimed for her first book The Grass is Singing, she also emerged as a writer pursuing liberal ideas.

During the period of 1950-1960 she wrote the saga, Children of Violence, which was in part autobiographical.

Deeply engaged in politics, she definitively lost all illusions about communism in 1954. Two years later, she left the Communist Party because of the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising.

The work of Doris Lessing is deeply autobiographical, inspired by her African experiences, her childhood and her political and social engagements.

The themes evoked in her novels include cultural conflict, the flagrant injustices present in race relations, and the contradiction between individual consciousness and the greater good.

In 1956, having been a relentless critic of injustice, she was banned from staying in South African and Rhoseia.

With its publication in 1962, The Golden Notebook became the bible of the independent woman. Its main character, Anna Wulf, fills a notebook with reflections upon Africa, politics, gender relations and eroticism, Jungian analysis and images of dreams. The novel would not be translated into French until 1976, when it won the Prix Medicis for Foreign Literature.

In 1995, at the age of 66, she returned to South Africa to see her daughter, her grand-children and to promote her autobiography. She was welcomed with open arms, having finally won approval for the exact same themes that had prompted her expulsion some 40 years previously.

Doris Lessing was, despite herself, an icon of marxist, anti-colonial, anti-aparthied and feminist causes. She is the author of around 40 works.

A dedicated writer, in 1984, she decided to call her own work into question. She sent one of her manuscripts to her own editor and received a negative response. This reaction amused her and did not discourage her.

She has never stopped writing, and has experimented with several different genres, notably science fiction and opera. Her most recent novel published in English was The Cleft in 2007.

On the 11th of October 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lessing is the oldest writer to win the Nobel Prize.