Doris Lessing heard about her Nobel Prize while carrying in the groceries
When a journalist told Doris Lessing in 2007 that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, she swore mildly and kept unloading her shopping. She was then the oldest person ever given that prize, a self-taught writer who had left school at thirteen in colonial Rhodesia.
Doris May Tayler arrived on 22 October 1919 in the Iranian city of Kermanshah. Her father, who had lost a leg in the First World War, had met her mother, a nurse, while recovering in a London hospital, and took a bank clerk's job in Persia. In 1925 the family moved to Southern Rhodesia to farm about 1,000 acres of bush that never paid well. Doris left school at thirteen, left home at fifteen to work as a nursemaid, and began selling stories to magazines around then.
Two marriages in Salisbury ended in divorce, and in 1949 she moved to London with her youngest son, leaving her two older children with their father, a choice she later defended bluntly. The Grass Is Singing appeared the next year. Her opposition to apartheid got her banned from South Africa and Rhodesia in 1956, the same year the Soviet invasion of Hungary drove her out of the Communist Party. Files released in 2015 showed that MI5 and MI6 had watched her for about twenty years.
Critics split her work into three phases: a communist one of social realism, a psychological stretch that produced The Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence quintet, and a Sufi-influenced period that gave rise to the Canopus in Argos series, which she preferred to call space fiction. Many scholars read The Golden Notebook as a feminist classic, but she rejected the label and complained that its themes of breakdown and healing were missed. In 1982 she even wrote two novels as the unknown Jane Somers, and her own UK publisher turned them down, proving how hard it is for newcomers.
She refused a damehood in 1992, calling it an honour tied to an Empire that no longer existed, yet accepted the Companions of Honour at the end of 1999. A stroke in the late 1990s curbed her travel. She died at home in West Hampstead on 17 November 2013, aged 94, having published more than 50 novels.
Source: Doris Lessing
