Doris Lessing Bio

There’s a detail from 1949 that says almost everything about Doris Lessing’s determination.

She moved to the United Kingdom with her young son, arriving with almost nothing; a single manuscript in her suitcase.

Within a year, it had become her published debut, and her reputation as one of the century’s most unflinching literary voices was under way.

Early Life in Persia and Southern Rhodesia

Lessing’s early life was defined by displacement and self-reliance.

Born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Persia, on 22 October 1919, she was the daughter of Captain Alfred Tayler, who’d lost a leg during the First World War, and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh). Her father had met her mother, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital in London, where he was recovering from his amputation. The couple subsequently moved to Persia, where Alfred took a position as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia.

The family then moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where Lessing lived from age five until she settled in England in 1949.

She left school at 13 and was self-educated from that point on. She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, beginning to read political and sociological material given to her by her employer, and she started writing around this time.

She worked subsequently as a telephone operator and clerk, a typist, and a Hansard typist while living in Southern Rhodesia.

Those years in an isolated, racially stratified colonial society gave her fiction its earliest and most urgent subject matter.

London and The Grass Is Singing

Lessing moved to London in 1949 with her younger son Peter, to pursue her writing career and socialist beliefs, having left her two older children with their father, Frank Wisdom.

The Grass Is Singing, published the following year, was an immediate and widely noted success. It sold well in Britain, the United States, and across ten European countries (Nobel Prize Committee, 2007), and The Times described it as possessing “the dynamo-like throb of a formidable talent.”

The novel examines racial conflict in colonial Africa through the eyes of a white farmer’s wife and her Black servant, and it announced a writer who was prepared to confront what others avoided.

Politics and The Golden Notebook

During her Communist phase, from 1944 to 1956, she wrote radically about social issues, a theme to which she returned in The Good Terrorist (1985).

She became a member of the British Communist Party and campaigned actively against the use of nuclear weapons.

Her disillusionment with Soviet-aligned politics came to a head in 1956 when Soviet troops invaded Hungary. MI5 records from 1957 note that she was “disgusted with the Russian action in Hungary”; that rupture fed directly into the moral complexity of her fiction. She wasn’t a writer who kept her politics at arm’s length from her work.

The novel that made her international reputation, and that critics, readers, and the occasional feminist movement would argue over for decades, was The Golden Notebook (1962), which presents the crisis of a woman novelist, Anna Wulf, suffering from writer’s block. Immensely self-analytical, she seeks to probe her disordered life by keeping four notebooks: a black one covering her early years in British colonial Africa, a red one about her years as a communist, a yellow one containing the fictional story of her alter ego Ella, and a blue one serving as her diary.

The novel explores, among other themes, mental illness, individualism and alienation, the relativity of truth, dreams and psychoanalysis, feminism, and the demise of political idealism within the Communist Party in England.

Many view it as a feminist classic, though Lessing herself rejected being pigeonholed as a feminist author.

She always insisted that the book’s structural ambition mattered as much as its politics.

Major Series and the Jane Somers Experiment

Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952-1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983).

The Children of Violence sequence follows Martha Quest across five volumes, from Rhodesia to post-war London, and it draws heavily on Lessing’s own life.

The Canopus in Argos science fiction series explored concepts of Sufi mysticism,

and it proved genuinely divisive.

Critics found it difficult going, but Lessing considered it her most important work.

One of the more remarkable episodes in her career came in the early 1980s, when she tested the literary establishment with a deliberate experiment.

She published two novels under the name Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could… (1984).

She released these works under that pseudonym, as she later explained, because she “wanted to be reviewed on merit, as a new writer, without the benefit of a ‘name'”, to get free of the cage of associations that every established author must learn to inhabit.

Her British publisher Jonathan Cape rejected the Jane Somers novels without knowing who’d written them; they were eventually issued by Michael Joseph to modest sales (The Missing Slate, 2013).

When she revealed the authorship, the point was made with considerable force: the industry’s gatekeeping was exactly as she’d suspected.

Honours, the Nobel Prize and Legacy

She accepted a Companion of Honour title at the end of 1999 and a Companion of Literature designation from the Royal Society of Literature.

In 1992, she declined the offered Damehood of the British Empire, as she believed that empire no longer existed.

Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding it, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny” (Nobel Prize Committee, 2007).

At 87 years and 355 days old when the prize was announced on 11 October 2007, she was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, a record confirmed by Guinness World Records; she was also the eleventh woman to win it.

When reporters gathered outside her north London home to tell her the news, she was famously unruffled.

She told them, “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal flush.”

Her final book, Alfred and Emily, appeared in 2008.

Lessing died on 17 November 2013 at her home in London.

In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

Major Works

Awards and Recognition