Biography 14:

Doris Lessing Biography

Persian (Iranian)-born British writer, whose novels and short stories are largely concerned with people caught in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. Central themes in Lessing's works are feminism (see also Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedman, Germaine Greer, Marilyn French), the battle of sexes, and individuals in search for wholeness.

"Not simply an artist, she is also critic and prophet, dissecting in minute detail the faults of society "hypnotized by the idea of Armageddon" and prophesying the calamitous results of those faults. At the same time, she attempts to delineate possible solutions to the world's problems."
(Mary Ann Singleton in The City and the Veld , The Fiction of Doris Lessing, 1977)

Doris Lessing spent her early childhood in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), where her English-born father was a bank clerk. In the mid-1920s her father bought a maize farm in Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia), where she grew up. Lessing was educated in Salisbury at a Roman Catholic convent. She left the school at the age of fourteen and worked as a nursemaid, telephone operator and clerk. From the age 18 she worked at the Rhodesian parliament and helped to start a non-racist left-wing party in the country. Her first marriage ended in 1943. She joined the Communist Party and married the German political activist Gottfried Lessing, who later became the German ambassador to Uganda and was accidentally killed in the 1979 revolt against Idi Amin .

Lessing's second marriage did not succeed and in 1949 she moved to England with her youngest child and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing , which appeared in 1950. The story was set in Rhodesia and depicted a poor white farmer whose wife has a relationship with their African servant, and who eventually kills her.

Many critics consider Children of Violence , Lessing's semi-autobiographical series of novels about Martha Quest - who grows up in southern Africa and settles in England - her most substantial work. From this period she supported herself and her son by writing.

Lessing published poems, plays, and several science fiction novels. Her most widely read and translated book is THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK (1962). The book was hailed as a landmark by the Women's Movement. It deals with a crisis of novelist, who keeps four notebooks while working on her fictional novel 'Free Women'. Sections of conventional narrative ironically entitled 'Free Women' enclose and intersperse the four experimental notebooks of writer Anna Wolf who is struggling with crises in her domestic and political life. In the end Anna gives the 'golden notebook' to her American lover with a suggestion for the first sentence of his new novel: he in turn suggest the first sentence of hers. The conventional narrative ends more prosaically with Anna's declaration that she is about to join the Labour Party.

In BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL (1971) and MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR Leasing portrayed the breakdown of society. THE GOOD TERRORIST (1985) examined with irony a militant left-wing life style and the short distance between idealism and terrorism. Alice, the protagonist, sees herself as a committed revolutionary. She knows how to confront officials, spray-paint slogans, but she really do not have understanding of political movements. When explosives are stored under her own roof, she cares more about curtains than issues. As Alice tries to change the house in a genuine commune, she becomes the mother of parasitic companions.

"Kindly, skilled people watched, and waited, judging when people (like herself, like Pat) were ripe, could be really useful. Unsuspected by the petit bourgeois who were in the thrall of the mental superstructure of fascist-imperialistic Britain, the poor slaves of propaganda, were these watchers, the observes , the poor people who held all the strings in their hands. In factories, in big industries - where Comrade Andrew wanted her, Alice, to work; in the civil service (that was just the place for Comrade Muriel!); in the B.B.C., in the big newspapers - everywhere in fact was this network, and even in little unimportant places like these two houses, Nose 43 and 45, just ordinary squats and communes. Nothing was too small to be overlooked; everyone with any sort of potential was noticed, observed, and treasured... It gave her a safe, comfortable feeling."
(From The Good Terrorist)

THE FIFTH CHILD (1988) was a horror story, in which a family is torn apart by the arrival of their fifth offspring, a monster. LOVE, AGAIN (1966) was set in the theatre world. The protagonist is an older woman, manager of a small theatre company, whose self-analysis parallels with a new production. AFRICAN LAUGTER (1994) described Blessing's four visits to Zimbabwe between 1982 and 1992.

In 1981 David Glad well adapted Blessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor for a film. Leasing has also collaborated with the composer Philip Glass on an opera based on the novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 . Among Blessing's several literature prizes are Somerset Mangham Award (1956) and the W.H. Smith Award (1986). The first volume of her autobiography, UNDER MY SKIN, was published in 1994, and depicted her childhood in Zimbabwe. WALKING IN THE SHADE (1997) covered the years from 1959 to 1962.

For further reading: Doris Lessing by Carole Klein (1999); Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing by Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis (1999); Between East and West by Muge Galin (1997); Doris Lessing by Gayle Greene (1994); Woolf and Lessing, ed. by Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin (1994); Fine-Tuning the Feminine Psyche by Lorei Cederdstrom (1990); Approaches to Teaching Lessing's The Golden Notebook, ed. by Carey Kaplan, Ellen Cronan Rose (1989); Doris Lessing by Ruth Whittaker (1988); Doris Lessing by Carey Kaplan (1988); Rereading Doris Lessing by Claire Sprague (1987); Doris Lessing by Mona Knapp (1985); The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing by Katherine Fishburn (1985); Substance Under Pressure by Betsy Draine (1983); Doris Lessing by Dee Seligman (1981); The City and the Veld : The Fiction of Doris Lessing by Mary Ann Singleton (1977); The Novels of Doris Lessing by P. Schlueter (1973); Doris Lessing by D. Brewster (1965)

Note: Lessing's Children of violence and The Canopus in Argos reflect the influence of Sufist precepts, which are concerned with the union of the soul with a Higher Being (The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and Peter Nichols, 1993). Her science fiction novels were published under the name Jane Somers to dramatize the problems of unknown writers. -Also Stephen King has published novels under a pseudonym (Richard Bachman) to see public reaction to a new name and to experiment with different type of horror fiction.

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