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BIOGRAPHY

Doris Lessing was born Doris May May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nursed. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Dori's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.

Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with storys of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education.

But like other women writers from southern Affrican who did not graduate from high school, Lessing made herself into a self educated intellectual

Lessing's carly reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H.Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtimes stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake,spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison".

Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociologyn to read. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrate by her backward suitor she she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood.

Lessing believes that she was free than most people because she became a writer.

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom and had two children. Afew years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family,remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read."

Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group ; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left althogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, mutch of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has writen about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among oposing elements with an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageus outspoknness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

After writing the Children of Violence and The Golden Book, she was attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise"

Lessing's other novels include The Golden Terrorist(1985) and The Fifth Child(1988), The Diary of a Good Neighbour, If the Old Could..., Under My Skin...

In June 1995 she received an honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daugther and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in1956 for her political views. Ironically, she was welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins.

And the honors keep on coming: ehs was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996.

In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time, providing the libretto for the opera"The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" which premiered in Heideiberg, Germany in May. Walking in the Shade, the anxious awaited second volume of her authobiography, was published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/authobiography category. This volume documents her arrival in England in 1949 and takes up to the publication of The Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her authobiography, she will not be writing a third volume.

Her new novel titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the U.S. in January 1999 and the U.K.in April 1999.

In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Anual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya.

December 31 1999: in the U.K.'s last Honours List before the new Millennium, Doris Lessing was appointed aCompanion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done "conspicuous national service".

Ben, in the World, the sequel to The Fifth Child was published in Spring 2000(U.K.) and Summer 2000(U.S.).Another new novel is planned for this year.

BIBLIOGRAFIA