Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing is one of the most prolific and celebrated authors writing in English today. Her work ranges from realistic early novels, many of which draw directly from her African childhood, to later books that experiment with literary genre (including science fiction) and form. In addition, Lessing has written poetry, drama, nonfiction, and a series of memoirs. Deeply influenced by her early exposure to racial, class, and sexual inequality, Lessing raises in her writing questions about politics, society, religion, work, and family—meditations at the heart of her most influential work, The Golden Notebook (1962).After two marriages and two divorces, in 1949 Lessing moved from Salisbury (the Southern Rhodesian capital, now Harare, Zimbabwe) to London, England, taking with her only the youngest of her three children. She also brought the manuscript that would become her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950). Literary success came quickly; over the next ten years, Lessing published four more novels, in addition to stories, plays, reviews, and essays. She gained a reputation as a writer whose work probed both the personal and the political—particularly for women.. Along with her interest in racial and gender politics and intergenerational relationships, Lessing began to draw from the teachings of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. Hints of the supernatural in the series' last entry are expanded in the five-volume science-fiction series Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983). Later novels include The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988), and Love, Again (1996); works focused on Africa include Collected African Stories (1973), African Laughter (1992), and Going Home (1996). Lessing has also published two volumes of her ongoing autobiography, Under my Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997). Critics praise Lessing's fierce, unsentimental honesty and her unique imagination, and many consider her one of the finest novelists writing in English today.