Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) was a British novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose more than fifty books traced colonial Africa, postwar London, communist disillusion, feminism, science fiction, and old age. The Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, calling her an epicist of the female experience.

Born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), to British parents, she moved at six to a struggling maize farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She left a Catholic convent school at fourteen, worked as a nursemaid and telephone operator, married twice, and joined a small Marxist circle in Salisbury before sailing for London in 1949 with the manuscript of her first novel and her younger son.

The Grass Is Singing appeared in 1950 and made her name. Her five-volume Children of Violence sequence (1952–1969) followed Martha Quest from the African veld to nuclear-shadowed England, and her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook—with its fractured notebooks and frank treatment of women's inner lives—became a foundational text for the second-wave feminist movement, although Lessing herself resisted the label. She declared Rhodesia a prohibited immigrant in 1956 and was barred for decades.

From the late 1970s she experimented with what she called space fiction in the Canopus in Argos series, returned to realism with The Good Terrorist (1985), and kept writing memoir, drama, and essays into her late eighties. She died at her London home at 94, four years after accepting the Nobel on her doorstep with a wry shrug.

The name Doris comes from the Greek Doris, the sea-nymph wife of Nereus and mother of the fifty Nereids, and means woman of the Dorian people; she wore it as a watchful chronicler of currents.