Visionary Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize Literature 2007
“that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”
Doris Lessing One of Our Most Celebrated
Doris Lessing is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our times. She has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain's Prince of Asturia Prize and Prix Catalunya, and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Aw rd for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature to name but a few (see full list).On December 10th, 2007, perhaps the biggest accolade of all, The Nobel Prize for Literature.
A Full Life
Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 to British parents in what was then known as Kermanshah in Persia (now Bakhtaran in Iran) as Doris May Taylor. Her father, Alfred Cook Taylor, formerly a captain in the British army during the First World War, was a bank official. Her mother, Emily Maude Taylor, had been a nurse. In 1925 the family moved to a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) hoping to improve their income. Lessing described her childhood on the farm in the first part of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). At the age of seven, she was sent to a convent boarding school but later moved to a girls’ school in Salisbury. When 14 she independently ended her formal schooling. In the following years she worked as a young nanny, telephonist, office worker, stenographer and journalist and had several short stories published.
In 1939 she married Frank Charles Wisdom with whom she had a son, John, and a daughter, Jean. The couple divorced in 1943. In 1945 Doris married Gottfried Lessing, a German-Jewish immigrant she had met in a Marxist group mainly concerned with the race issue. She became involved with the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party. She and Gottfried had a son, Peter. When the couple divorced in 1949, she took Peter and moved to London, quickly establishing herself as a writer. Between 1952 and 1956 she was a member of the British Communist Party and was active in the campaign against nuclear weapons. Because of her criticism of the South African regime, she was prohibited entry to that country between 1956 and 1995. After a brief visit to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she was banned there as well for the same reason. In African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992) she described going back in 1982 to the country where she had grown up. She now lives in London.
Debut Novel
Doris Lessing made her debut as a novelist with The Grass is Singing (1950), which examines the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. The book is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts.
Even the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, usually called the Martha Quest series for its main character, is largely set in Africa. The series comprises Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969). It describes Martha Quest’s awakening to greater awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman. With these books Lessing created a modern equivalent of the Bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century. The Children of Violence, despite its emphatic liberation theme, is characterised by an almost fatalistic outlook. The story is told with the mild despair of someone seeing her younger self from the heavens of an afterlife, unable to intervene. The masterpiece is the final volume of the series, The Four-Gated City, a period frescoe apparently enveloping all of England – indeed our entire culture – illuminated by the author’s empathy and in civility.
Golden Notebook Sets a Theme
The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough (see 1962 publicity shot right) The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed form reflects that of the main character’s mind. There is no single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience.
Books published in the 1970s included Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), inspired by R. D. Laing. Lessing has characterised her novel from this period as ”inner-space fiction”: an attempt in the spirit of Romanticism to expand human knowledge to encompass regions beyond the control of reason and the ego.
In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing expanded the science fiction genre. The series studies the post-atomic war development of the human species. Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles. Among inspirations for the work was the Idries Shah’s school of Sufism that she discovered in the 1960s. Doris Lessing revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004) collection of essays.
Lessing returned to realistic narrative in The Good Terrorist (1985), providing a satirical picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonist’s misdirected martyrdom and subjugation. Her analysis of the greenhouse for the terrorist mind in generation hatred and an Übermensch attitude retains currency.
The autobiographical Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) represented a new peak in her writing. Lessing recalls not only her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the empire. Her novel The Sweetest Dream (2001) is a stand-alone sequel in fictive form. Perhaps her unsparing view of the polical antics of friends and lovers necessitated such discretion.
Her other important novels are The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988). In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a woman finally about to fulfil her gift and sexual desires. After a first reading, the contours of the real novel take shape: a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. The Fifth Child is a masterfully realised psychological thriller, where a woman’s repressed or denied aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child.
The vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life has had special appeal for Doris Lessing. It reappears in some of her books of recent years: the fantasy novel Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Mara´s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005). From collapse and chaos emerge the elementary qualities that allow Lessing to retain hope in humanity.
Literary Prizes: Somerset Maugham Award (1954), Prix Médicis étranger (1976), Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur (1981), Shakespeare-Preis der Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S., Hamburg (1982), W. H. Smith Literary Award (1986), Palermo Prize (1987), Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987), Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989), James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize (1995), Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995), Premio Internacional Catalunya (1999), David Cohen British Literary Prize (2001), Companion of Honour from the Royal Society of Literature (2001), Premio Principe de Asturias (2001), S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002).
The Grass is Singing. – London : M. Joseph, 1950 ; New York : Crowell, 1950
This was the Old Chief's Country. – London : M. Joseph, 1951 ; New York : Crowell, 1952
Martha Quest. – London : M. Joseph, 1952. – (Children of Violence; 1)
Five : Short Novels. – London : M. Joseph, 1953
A Proper Marriage. – London : M. Joseph, 1954. – (Children of Violence; 2)
A Retreat to Innocence. – London : M. Joseph, 1956 ; New York : Prometheus, 1959
The Habit of Loving. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1957 ; New York : Crowell, 1958
Going Home. – London : M. Joseph, 1957 ; New York : Ballantine, 1968
A Ripple from the Storm. – London : M. Joseph, 1958 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1966. – (Children of Violence; 3)
Fourteen Poems. – Northwood : Scorpion Press, 1959
In Pursuit of the English : a Documentary. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1960 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1961
Play with a Tiger : a Play in Three Acts. – London : M. Joseph, 1962
The Golden Notebook. – London : M. Joseph, 1962 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1962
A Man and Two Women. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1963 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1963
Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. – New York : Simon & Schuster, 1964
African Stories. – London : M. Joseph, 1964 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1965
Landlocked. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1965 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1966. – (Children of Violence; 4)
A Ripple from the Storm and Landlocked. – New York : Simon & Schuster, 1966
The Black Madonna. – London : Panther, 1966
Winter in July. – London : Panther, 1966
Particularly Cats. – London : M. Joseph, 1967 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1967
The Four-Gated City. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1969 ; New York : Knopf, 1969. – (Children of Violence; 5)
Briefing for a Descent into Hell. – London : Cape, 1971 ; New York : Knopf, 1971
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories. – London : Cape, 1972. – Republ. as The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories. – New York : Knopf, 1972
Collected African stories. Vol. 1, This was the Old Chief's Country. – London : M. Joseph, 1973
Collected African stories. Vol. 2, The Sun Between Their Feet. – London : M. Joseph, 1973
The Summer Before the Dark. – London : Cape, 1973 ; New York : Knopf, 1973
The Memoirs of a Survivor. – London : Octagon, 1974 ; New York : Knopf, 1975
Stories. – New York : Knopf, 1978
To Room Nineteen : Collected Stories Volume One. – London : Cape, 1978
The Temptation of Jack Orkney : Collected Stories Volume Two. – London : Cape, 1978
Shikasta : Re: Colonised Planet 5. – London : Cape, 1979 ; New York : Knopf, 1979. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 1)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five. – London : Cape, 1980 ; New York : Knopf, 1980. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 2)
The Sirian Experiments. – London : Cape, 1981 ; New York : Knopf, 1981. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 3)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. – London : Cape, 1982 ; New York : Knopf, 1982. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 4)
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. – London : Cape, 1983 ; New York : Knopf, 1983. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 5)
The Diary of a Good Neighbour. – London : M. Joseph, 1983 ; New York : Knopf, 1983
If the Old Could ... – London: M. Joseph, 1984 ; New York : Knopf, 1984
The Diaries of Jane Somers. – London : M. Joseph, 1984 ; New York : Knopf, 1984
The Good Terrorist. – London : Cape, 1985 ; New York : Knopf, 1985
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. – London : Cape, 1987 ; New York : Harper & Row, 1987
The Wind Blows Away Our Words. – London : Picador, 1987 ; New York : Vintage, 1987
The Fifth Child. – London : Cape, 1988 ; New York : Knopf, 1988
The Real Thing : Stories and Sketches. – Republ. as London Observed : Stories and Sketches. – London : HarperCollins, 1992
African Laughter : Four Visits to Zimbabwe. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 1992
Shadows on the Wall of the Cave : a talk by Doris Lessing delivered 19 January 1994. – London : The British Library, 1994
Conversations / edited by Earl G. Ingersol. – Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press, 1994
A Small Personal Voice : Essays, Reviews, Interviews / Edited by Paul Schlueter. – London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 1994
Under My Skin : Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 1994
Spies I Have Known and Other Stories. – Glasgow : Collins Educational, 1995
Playing the Game. – London : HarperCollins, 1995
Love, Again. – London : Flamingo, 1996 ; New York : HarperCollins, 1996
Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays. – London : Flamingo, 1996
Walking in the Shade : Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 1997
Mara and Dann : an Adventure. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 1999
Ben, in the World. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 2000
The Sweetest Dream. – London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 2001 ; New York : HarperCollins, 2002
On Cats. – London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 2002
The Grandmothers : Four Short Novels. – London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 2003 ; New York : HarperCollins, 2004
Time Bites : Views and Reviews. – London : Fourth Estate, 2004 ; New York : HarperCollins, 2004
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. – London : Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 2005 ; New York : HarperCollins, 2006
The Cleft. – London : Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 2007 ; New York : HarperCollins, 2007
