Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing, CH (born 22 October 1919), is a British writer, born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran).

Her family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) in 1925, to live a rough life farming maize. Unfortunately, the thousand acres (4 km²) of bush failed to yield wealth, thwarting her mother's desire to live the life of a Victorian in "savage lands". Lessing attended a Roman Catholic girl's school, although her family was not Catholic. She left school at the age of 15 and was self-educated from that point onwards.

Despite this difficult and unhappy childhood, Lessing's writings about life in British Africa are filled with a compassion for both the sterile lives of the British colonists and the plight of the indigenous inhabitants.

She was married twice (and twice divorced) and had three children. Her second husband was Gottfried Lessing, a German emigrant. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in London in 1949, after she had moved to Europe, where she has been living ever since.

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturia Prize in Literature for her works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize. She declined a damehood, but accepted a Companion of Honour.

[edit] Literary Style

Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: The Communist theme 1944-1956 when she was writing radically on social issues, The psychological theme 1956-1969, and after that The Sufi theme which was explored in the Canopus series (see below). After the sufist themes Lessing has worked in all three areas.

Her novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic among many scholars, but notably not by the author herself. This novel also allegedly made Lessing a candidate for the Nobel prize, but her later science fiction books (The Canopus series) may have discredited her, so that she was removed from the unofficial list of those under consideration. Lessing does not like the idea of being recognized as a feminist author. When asked why, Lessing replies:

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.

—Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July 1982

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 (also see Progressor and Uplift). 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.

Apart from this, she has also written several short stories about cats, which are her favourite animals.

[edit] Bibliography

• The Grass Is Singing (1950)
• This Was the Old Chief's Country (collection) (1951)
• The Children of Violence Series (1952-1969):
  • Martha Quest (1952)
  • A Proper Marriage (1954)
  • A Ripple from the Storm (1958)
  • Landlocked (1965)
  • The Four-Gated City (1969)
• Going Home (memoir) (1957)
• The Habit of Loving (collection) (1957)
  • Wine (short story) (1957)
• In Pursuit of the English (nonfiction) (1960)
• The Golden Notebook (1962)
• A Man and Two Women (collection) (1963)
• African Stories (collection) (1964)
• Cat Tales:
  • Particularly Cats (stories & nonfiction) (1967)
  • The Old Age of El Magnifico (stories & nonfiction) (2000)
• Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)
• The Temptation of Jack Orkney and other Stories (collection) (1972)
• The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
• A Small Personal Voice (Essays) (1974)
• Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
• The Canopus in Argos: Archives Series (1979-1983):
  • Shikasta (1979)
  • The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980)
  • The Sirian Experiments (1980)
  • The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982)
  • The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)
• Stories (collection) (1978)
• Under the pseudonym Jane Somers:
  • The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983)
  • If the Old Could... (1984)
• The Good Terrorist (1985)
• Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (essays, 1987)
• The Fifth Child (1988)
• African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (memoir) (1992)
• Conversations (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll) (1994)
• Lessing's autobiography:
  • Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (1994)
  • Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949 to 1962 (1997)
• Spies I Have Known (collection) (1995)
• Love, Again (1996)
• The Pit (collection) (1996)
• Mara and Dann (1999)
• Ben, in the World (a sequel to The Fifth Child) ISBN 0-06-093465-4 (2000)
• The Sweetest Dream ISBN 0-06-093755-6 (2001)
• The Grandmothers : Four Short Novels ISBN 0-06-053010-3 (2003)
• The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (a sequel to Mara and Dann) (2005)

[edit] External links

• Doris Lessing homepage created by Jan Hanford
• Doris Lessing on MySpace
• Doris Lessing at the Open Directory Project
• Lessing interview from NY Times 1982
• a notorious life SALON INTERVIEW 1997: DORIS LESSING talks about the illusions of communism, political correctness and why the sexual revolution backfired
• Doris Lessing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Audio Interviews with Doris Lessing by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio
• Doris Lessing at www.contemporarywriters.com
• Review of Lessing's Stories
• Joyce Carol Oates on Doris Lessing
• The Doris Lessing Online Retrospective
• 1988, 1992 audio interview with Doris Lessing by Don Swaim