Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Lessing at the Lit Cologne literary festival in 2006
Born Doris May Tayler
22 October 1919
Kermanshah, Persia
Died 17 November 2013 (aged 94)
London, England
Pen name Jane Somers
Occupation Writer
Nationality British
Citizenship United Kingdom
Period 1950–2013
Genre Novel, short story, biography, drama, libretto, poetry
Literary movement Modernism, postmodernism, Sufism, socialism, feminism, science fiction
Notable works
Notable awards
Spouse
Website
www.dorislessing.org

Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).

Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".[1] Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.[2][3][4]

In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[5]

Life

Early life

Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Iran, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), both British subjects.[6] Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation.[7][8] The couple moved to Kermanshah, for Alfred to take a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia; it was there that Doris was born in 1919.[9][10] In 1925, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize and other plants on about 1,000 acres (400 ha) of bush that Alfred bought. In the rough environment, Emily tried to lead an Edwardian lifestyle, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm did not deliver any monetary value.[11]

Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare).[12] She left school at age 14, and was self-educated from then on; she left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology[8] and began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John, born in 1939, and Jean, born in 1943), before the marriage ended in 1943.[8]

After her first divorce, Lessing's interest was drawn to the popular community of the Left Book Club, a communist book club which she had joined the year before.[11][13] It was here that she met her future second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter, born in 1947), before they divorced in 1949. She did not marry again.[8]

Lessing moved to London in 1949 with her youngest son, Peter, to pursue her writing career and communist beliefs, but left the two elder children with their father in South Africa. She later said that at the time she saw no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."[14] As well as campaigning against nuclear arms, she was an active opponent of apartheid which led in 1956 to being banned from South Africa and Rhodesia for many years.[15] In the same year, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, she left the British Communist Party.[16]

Career

Lessing first sold stories to magazines at the age of 15, in South Africa.[17] Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950.[11] Her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook, was written in 1962.[10] By the time of her death, more than 50 of her novels had been published.[18]

In 1982, Lessing tried to publish two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers, to show the difficulty new authors faced in trying to have their works in print. The novels were declined by Lessing's UK publisher, but were later accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. The Diary of a Good Neighbour[19] was published in Britain and the US in 1983, and If the Old Could in both countries in 1984,[20] both as written by Jane Somers. In 1984, both novels were re-published in both countries (Viking Books publishing in the US), this time under one cover, with the title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.[21]

Lessing declined a damehood in 1992 for it being in the name of a non-existent Empire; also declined appointment as OBE in 1977.[22] Later she accepted appointment as a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service".[23] She was also made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.[24]

In 2007, Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[25][26] She received the prize at the age of 88 years 52 days, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third-oldest Nobel laureate in any category (after Leonid Hurwicz and Raymond Davis Jr.).[27][28] She also was only the 11th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history.[29] Lessing was out shopping for groceries when the announcement came, arriving home to tell reporters who had gathered there, "Oh Christ!"[30] She told reporters outside her home, "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."[31] She titled her Nobel Lecture On Not Winning the Nobel Prize and used it to draw attention to global inequality of opportunity, and to explore changing attitudes to storytelling and literature. The lecture was later published in a limited edition to raise money for children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. In a 2008 interview for the BBC's Front Row, she stated that increased media interest after the award had left her without time or energy for writing.[32] Her final book, Alfred and Emily, appeared in 2008.

A 2010 BBC radio documentary titled Useful Idiots listed among "useful idiots" of Joseph Stalin several prominent British writers, including Doris Lessing.[33][34]

Illness and death

During the late 1990s, Lessing suffered a mini-stroke[35] which stopped her from travelling during her later years.[36] She was still able to attend the theatre and opera.[35] She began to focus her mind on death, for example asking herself if she would have time to finish a new book.[15][35] She died on 17 November 2013, aged 94, at her home in London, predeceased by her two sons, but survived by her daughter, Jean, who lives in South Africa.[37]

Fiction

Idries Shah, who introduced Lessing to Sufism[38]

Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme (1944–56), when she was writing radically on social issues (to which she returned in The Good Terrorist [1985]); the psychological theme (1956–1969); and after that the Sufi theme, which was explored in the Canopus in Argos sequence of science fiction (or as she preferred to put it "space fiction") novels and novellas. Doris Lessing's first novel The Grass Is Singing, as well as the collection of short stories African Stories are set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Lessing's Canopus sequence was not popular with many mainstream literary critics. For example, in the New York Times in 1982 John Leonard wrote in reference to The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 that "[o]ne of the many sins for which the 20th century will be held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs. Lessing... She now propagandises on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic razzmatazz,"[39] to which Lessing replied: "What they didn't realise was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like Blood Music, by Greg Bear. He's a great writer."[40] Unlike some authors primarily known for their mainstream work, she never hesitated to admit that she wrote science fiction and attended the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention as its Writer Guest of Honor. Here she made a speech in which she described her dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor as "an attempt at an autobiography."[41]

The Canopus in Argos novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution of other worlds, including Earth. Using Sufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher" Idries Shah,[38] the series of novels also utilises an approach similar to that employed by the early 20th century mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in his work All and Everything. Earlier works of "inner space" fiction like Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) also connect to this theme. Lessing's interest had turned to Sufism after coming to the realisation that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her disillusioned.[42]

Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars,[43] but notably not by the author herself, who later wrote that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one's self from illusions had been overlooked by critics. She also regretted that critics failed to appreciate the exceptional structure of the novel. She explained in Walking in the Shade that she modelled Molly partly on her good friend Joan Rodker, the daughter of the modernist poet and publisher John Rodker.[44]

Lessing did not like being pigeonholed as a feminist author. When asked why, she explained:

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[9]

Doris Lessing Society

The Doris Lessing Society is dedicated to supporting the scholarly study of Lessing’s work. The formal structure of the Society dates from January 1977, when the first issue of the Doris Lessing Newsletter was published. In 2002 the Newsletter became the academic journal, Doris Lessing Studies. The Society also organizes panels at the Modern Languages Association (MLA) annual Conventions and has held two international conferences in New Orleans in 2004 and Leeds in 2007.[45]

Archive

Lessing's largest literary archive is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. The 45 archival boxes of Lessing's materials at the Ransom Center contain nearly all of her extant manuscripts and typescripts up to 1999. Original material for Lessing's early books is assumed not to exist because she kept none of her early manuscripts.[46] Other institutions, including the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa, and the University of East Anglia hold smaller collections.[47][48]

Awards

List of works

Novels
The Children of Violence series
The Canopus in Argos: Archives series
Opera libretti
Comics
Drama
  • Each His Own Wilderness (three plays, 1959)
  • Play with a Tiger (1962)
Poetry collections
  • Fourteen Poems (1959)
  • The Wolf People – INPOPA Anthology 2002 (poems by Lessing, Robert Twigger and T.H. Benson, 2002)
Short story collections
  • Five Short Novels (1953)
  • The Habit of Loving (1957)
  • A Man and Two Women (1963)
  • African Stories (1964)
  • Winter in July (1966)
  • The Black Madonna (1966)
  • The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972)
  • This Was the Old Chief's Country: Collected African Stories, Vol. 1 (1973)
  • The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories, Vol. 2 (1973)
  • To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, Vol. 1 (1978)
  • The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories, Vol. 2 (1978)
  • Through the Tunnel (1990)
  • London Observed: Stories and Sketches (1992)
  • The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (1992)
  • Spies I Have Known (1995)
  • The Pit (1996)
  • The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (2003) (filmed as Two Mothers)
Cat Tales
  • Particularly Cats (stories and nonfiction, 1967)
  • Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor (stories and nonfiction, 1993)
  • The Old Age of El Magnifico (stories and nonfiction, 2000)
  • On Cats (2002) – omnibus edition containing the above three books
Autobiography and memoirs
Other non-fiction
  • In Pursuit of the English (1960)
  • Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (essays, 1987)
  • The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987)
  • A Small Personal Voice (essays, 1994)
  • Conversations (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1994)
  • Putting the Questions Differently (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1996)
  • Time Bites (essays, 2004)
  • On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (Nobel Lecture, 2007, published 2008)

See also

References

  1. ↑ "NobelPrize.org". Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  2. ↑ Crown, Sarah."Doris Lessing wins Nobel prize", The Guardian, 11 October 2013. Retrieved 12 October 2007.
  3. ↑ Editors at BBC. Author Lessing wins Nobel honour. BBC News. Retrieved 12 October 2007.
  4. ↑ Marchand, Philip. Doris Lessing oldest to win literature award. Toronto Star; retrieved 13 October 2007.
  5. ↑ (5 January 2008). The 50 greatest British writers since 1945 at the Wayback Machine (archived April 25, 2011). The Times. Retrieved 25 April 2011.
  6. ↑ Hazelton, Lesley (11 October 2007). "Golden Notebook' Author Lessing Wins Nobel Prize". Bloomberg. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  7. ↑ Carole Klein. "Doris Lessing". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 "Doris Lessing". kirjasto. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Hazelton, Lesley (25 July 1982). "Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and 'Space Fiction'". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Author Lessing wins Nobel honour". BBC News. 11 October 2007. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 "Biography". HarperCollins. 1995. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  12. ↑ Carol Simpson Stern. Doris Lessing Biography. biography.jrank.org. Retrieved on 11 October 2007.
  13. ↑ "Brief Chronology". A Home for the Highland Cattle & The Antheap. Broadview Press. 2003. Retrieved 29 December 2010.
  14. ↑ Lowering the Bar. When bad mothers give us hope. Newsweek 6 May 2010. Retrieved 9 May 2010.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Peter Guttridge (17 November 2013). "Doris Lessing: Nobel Prize-winning author whose work ranged from social and political realism to science fiction". The Independent. Retrieved 17 November 2013.
  16. ↑ Miller, Stephen (17 November 2013). "Nobel Author Doris Lessing Dies at 94". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 23 November 2013.
  17. ↑ Lessing, Doris. "Biography (From the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995)".
  18. ↑ Kennedy, Maev (17 November 2013). "Doris Lessing dies aged 94". the Guardian.
  19. ↑ "The Diary of a Good Neighbour by Doris Lessing". Doris Lessing. Retrieved 13 August 2012.
  20. ↑ http://www.dorislessing.org/ifthe.html
  21. ↑ Hanft, Adam. When Doris Lessing Became Jane Somers and Tricked the Publishing World (And Possibly Herself In the Process). Huffington Post. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  22. ↑ Flood, Alison (22 October 2008). "Doris Lessing donates revelatory letters to university". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 October 2012.
  23. ↑ "Doris Lessing interview". BBC Radio. Archived from the original (AUDIO) on 14 October 2007. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  24. ↑ "Companions of Literature list". Archived from the original on 7 July 2007. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  25. ↑ Rich, Motoko and Lyall, Sarah. Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature. The New York Times. Retrieved 11 October 2007.
  26. ↑ British Author, Doris Lessing, bags 2007 Nobel Literature Prize
  27. ↑ Hurwicz won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2007 at age 90. Davis received the 2002 Physics Prize at 88 years 57 days. Their birth dates are shown in their biographies at the Nobel Prize web site, which states that the awards are given annually on 10 December.
  28. ↑ Pierre-Henry Deshayes. Doris Lessing wins Nobel Literature Prize. Herald Sun. Retrieved 16 October 2007.
  29. ↑ Reynolds, Nigel. Doris Lessing wins Nobel prize for literature. The Telegraph. Retrieved on 15 October 2007.
  30. ↑ Lessing's Legacy of Political Literature CBS News 12 October 2007
  31. ↑ Hinckley, David. Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize for Literature. New York Daily News. Retrieved 15 October 2007.
  32. ↑ "Lessing: Nobel win a 'disaster'". BBC News. 11 May 2008. Retrieved 11 May 2008.
  33. ↑ Useful Idiots - Part One BBC
  34. ↑ "Doris Lessing  – A useful (and youthful) idiot". The Zimbabwean. 16 August 2010. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
  35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 35.2 Raskin, Jonah (June 1999). "The Progressive Interview: Doris Lessing". The Progressive (reprint). dorislessing.org. Retrieved November 17, 2013.
  36. ↑ Helen T. Verongos (17 November 2013). "Doris Lessing, Novelist Who Won 2007 Nobel, is Dead at 94". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 November 2013.
  37. ↑ Author Doris Lessing dies aged 94 BBC; retrieved 17 November 2013
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 Lessing, Doris. "On the Death of Idries Shah (excerpt from Shah's obituary in the London The Daily Telegraph)". dorislessing.org. Retrieved 3 October 2008.
  39. ↑ Leonard, John (7 February 1982). "The Spacing Out of Doris Lessing". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 October 2008.
  40. ↑ Doris Lessing: Hot Dawns, interview by Harvey Blume in Boston Book Review
  41. ↑ "Guest of Honor Speech", in Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches, edited by Mike Resnick and Joe Siclari (Deerfield, IL: ISFIC Press, 2006), p. 192.
  42. ↑ "Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory", Volume 31 of Routledge research in postcolonial literatures, Dennis Walder, Taylor & Francis ltd, 2010, p92. ISBN 9780203840382.
  43. ↑ "Fresh Air Remembers 'Golden Notebook' Author Doris Lessing". NPR. 18 November 2013. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
  44. ↑ Lessing's Early and Transitional Novels: The Beginnings of a Sense of Selfhood. Retrieved 17 October 2007.
  45. ↑ Official website
  46. ↑ "Harry Ransom Center Holds Archive of Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing". hrc.utexas.edu. Retrieved 17 March 2008.
  47. ↑ "Doris Lessing manuscripts". lib.utulsa.edu. Retrieved 17 October 2007.
  48. ↑ "Doris Lessing Archive". University of Tulsa. Retrieved 18 November 2013.
  49. ↑ "Memòria del Departament de Cultura 1999" (PDF) (in Catalan). Generalitat de Catalunya. 1999. p. 38. Retrieved 17 November 2013.
  50. ↑ "Golden Pen Award, official website". English PEN. Retrieved 3 December 2012.

Further reading

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