British · b. 1919
Doris Lessing was a British novelist whose politically engaged, formally ambitious fiction moved from Marxist realism to feminist consciousness-raising to visionary science fiction.
Born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents and raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Lessing moved to London in 1949 with a manuscript under her arm and the manuscript of what would become The Grass Is Singing already written. She died in 2013 having received the Nobel Prize in 2007 — at 88, the oldest person ever to receive it at the time — and reportedly greeted the news at her front door with “Oh Christ.” Her career spanned six decades and crossed genre boundaries with a freedom that made her hard to place and impossible to dismiss.
The Golden Notebook (1962) is her most important work and one of the formally radical achievements of postwar British fiction. Anna Wulf, a writer blocked and fragmenting, attempts to hold the disparate parts of her life — political, personal, creative, fictional — in four separately coloured notebooks and a fifth, golden notebook that tries to unify them. The novel’s structure performs what it describes: the difficulty of integrating a life that society insists on fragmenting. Its influence on second-wave feminism was enormous, though Lessing herself was characteristically ambivalent about being read primarily as a feminist text, finding the reduction irritating. Her five-volume Children of Violence sequence — following Martha Quest from Southern Africa to London — is her other major achievement in realism.
Later in her career she turned to science fiction with the Canopus in Argos series, which many of her realist readers found baffling and which her science fiction readers tended to find underrated. She was always more interested in the next thing she was doing than in the reputation of the thing she had already done, which is one definition of a serious writer.
by Doris Lessing
Anna Wulf, a blocked writer and communist, keeps four notebooks — black for her African novel, red for politics, yellow for fiction, blue for her diary — and a fifth golden notebook in which she attempts to bring them together: a formally radical portrait of a woman trying to hold her fractured self in one place.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Doris Lessing
Mary Turner, the wife of a failed white Rhodesian farmer, is found murdered by her Black houseboy Moses. The novel opens with this fact and moves backward, tracing how a woman who was bright and independent in the city became isolated, desperate, and dependent on a Black servant in ways neither colonial society nor she herself could acknowledge.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Doris Lessing
Martha Quest, fifteen years old on a farm in Southern Rhodesia in the late 1930s, is furiously intelligent and furiously trapped—by her parents' colonial world, by the small-mindedness of white settler society, by being female. The first volume of Lessing's semi-autobiographical five-novel Children of Violence sequence.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Doris Lessing
Harriet and David Lovatt build a perfect large family in the 1960s English countryside, filling their house with children and relatives. Then their fifth child, Ben, is born: strange, immensely strong, and not quite human. The novel tracks what happens to a family—and a marriage—when one member refuses all social and emotional norms.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Doris Lessing
1980s London: Alice Mellings lives in a squat with a group of leftist radicals, cleaning up after them, cooking, begging money from her bourgeois parents, keeping the house. The group is drifting toward terrorism. Lessing's most explicitly political late novel—and a devastating portrait of idealism in decay.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Doris Lessing
A middle-aged professor is found wandering and amnesiac. As psychiatrists attempt to restore his 'normal' mind, the reader experiences the world he inhabits—visions of a cosmic mission, a tropical island, the war between light and dark. Lessing's most experimental novel, a challenge to the very concept of normality.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.