Doris Lessing (1919-2013) was notorious for her attraction to controversy both in and outside of her novels. Her works spoke to difficult issues of feminism and racism coming out of colonial Africa.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Storyteller was notorious for her attraction to controversy both in and outside of her novels. Her works spoke to difficult issues of feminism and racism coming out of colonial Africa, and her personal politics made her a polarizing figure in popular culture. Let’s talk about Doris Lessing.
Doris was born on October 22nd, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia, or modern-day Iran. She was the first child of Alfred Cook Tayler, a British official, and Emily McVeagh, a nurse. The two had met in a hospital during World War I, after Alfred had lost his leg.
Growing up, Doris felt estranged from her parents — she’d later write that her parents were disappointed by her birth and had rejected the idea of having a girl. Her mother was cold and Doris often stated her father’s constant war stories gave her a sense of “fatalism.”
In 1925, the family moved to Zimbabwe, which was then known as Southern Rhodesia, where Doris’ father planned to make money by farming corn. Doris was first homeschooled and later attended a boarding school. Doris became an avid reader. She later said it was one of the only ways to escape her mother’s eye.
After school, Doris moved to Rhodesia’s capital city, Salisbury. It was a hectic time for Doris personally and creatively — she wrote and destroyed two novels’ worth of writing.
As a young woman in Salisbury, Doris found no shortage of suitors. In 1939, she began a relationship with a civil servant named Frank Wisdom. Although Frank was already engaged to another woman at the time, he and Doris married within the year. It’s likely that Doris was pregnant with their first child at the time.
Doris gave birth to a son, John, in 1940. But a few years of married life left Doris feeling disillusioned. She became increasingly involved in politics, especially the South Arican Communist Party. She began attending meetings, distributed the party newsletter, and took part in protests against racist laws.
The political life suited Doris, and she found herself questioning her role as a housewife. In 1943, she gave birth to her second child, a girl named Jean. That same year, Doris left her family and married a German communist named Gottfried Lessing.
The union was, by Doris’ account, purely political. She saw it as her “revolutionary duty” to protect her fellow party member from a hostile wartime environment, and they planned to divorce after the war. Perhaps as a result, both sides had multiple affairs over the course of their marriage. Still, they had a son together, named Peter.
In 1949, after the planned divorce, Doris went to England with Peter. The following year, Doris’ first novel was published. Titled, “The Grass is Singing,” her debut dealt with issues of race and gender in colonial Africa. It garnered positive reviews and established her as an up-and-coming novelist. One year later, she published a volume of short stories to similar acclaim.
Doris’ career continued to flourish. She came out with a series of novels called “The Children of Violence” that reflected many of her own apprehensions about coming of age in colonial Africa — her books candidly depicted controversial subjects like communist ideology, abortion, and rejection of domestic life.
In 1962, Doris published her most famous work, “The Golden Notebook.” In it, Doris experimented with structure and narrative, and explored a side of womens’ private lives often kept from the public eye. The story follows a writer’s descent into madness, told through journal entries throughout her life. In the end, the protagonist has to shed societal expectations for her future and lose her identity, before she can emerge as a new self.
More than 50 years later, the Golden Notebook is still in print. While it was lauded as a feminist work for its depiction of women living outside of the domestic sphere, Doris was hesitant to associate with the feminist movement. She pointed to larger structural injustices, and criticized the feminist movement’s centralization of white, middle-class women.
At an event at the 92nd Street Y in 1970, she said, “I’ve got the feeling that the sex war is not the most important war going on, nor is it the most vital problem in our lives.”
In the 1970s and 80s, Doris ventured into a different genre: sci-fi. Still, her books focused on themes of colonization. With the help of composer Philip Glass, she converted two of those books into an opera.
Doris’ critiques of society went beyond the pages of her novels — in the 80s, she played a bit of a joke on the literary community when she attempted to publish two novels under a pseudonym. Her long-time publisher rejected the works, and the books received little praise when they did make it onto shelves. When she re-published a year later under her own name, they were met with resounding reviews.
Throughout her life, Doris remained dedicated to her political work.. She declined to be honored with an Order of the British Empire in 1977, and again declined an offer for damehood in 1992, citing her anti-colonial activism in her youth as her rationale.
In 2008, Doris came back from grocery shopping to find her front door swarmed by reporters, thereby finding out she’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She was the eleventh woman in history to receive the award. Upon receiving the news, she’s recorded to have said, “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less.”
Doris titled her Nobel acceptance speech “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize,” and used her time to draw attention to fiction’s role in addressing the inequalities of the world.
The later years of Doris’ life were relatively quiet. After suffering a stroke in the 1990s, she refused to travel. In 2008, she told reporters she felt drained by media coverage of her work, and that she didn’t have the energy to write. Her final book, Alfred and Emily, about her parents’ relationship, came out that year. Doris died on November 17, 2013, at 94.
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