Returning from the grocery store one day in 2007, Doris Lessing was informed by a journalist that she had won The Nobel Prize for Literature; she replied “Oh Christ” and continued to bring in her groceries. [1]
Doris Lessing is considered to be one of the most important authors of the second half of the twentieth century. She wrote more than 70 works across many genres, and three of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Lessing’s fiction often explored how women might live beyond the roles expected of them. In The Golden Notebook (1962), Anna Wulf is a writer, mother and political activist trying to hold together a life that seems to be coming apart. She records its separate strands—her writing, politics, relationships and inner life—in four notebooks.
Lessing knew the tensions of marriage and motherhood firsthand. At 19, she had married Frank Wisdom and had two children, John and Jean. After the marriage ended, she joined a Marxist group and married German refugee Gottfried Lessing and had a son, Peter. In 1949, when that marriage also ended, she moved from Southern Rhodesia, where she’d grown up, to England with Peter and the manuscript of her first novel, leaving John and Jean with their father. Later, she described the choice as painful. It has been seen both as a bold pursuit of a woman’s intellectual life and as a mother’s abandonment of her children.
Her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), exposed the racial injustice of colonial society in Southern Rhodesia. Lessing continued to write about Africa and became a vocal critic of apartheid. In her late seventies, a mini-stroke brought thoughts of death and of how many more books she might have time to write. She still enjoyed theatre and opera.
At 88, Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Too ill to travel to Stockholm, she received her medal and diploma in London, and her publisher delivered her lecture. Her final book, Alfred and Emily (2008), imagined her parents’ lives without the First World War before recalling the lives they actually led. Lessing died at her London home on 17 November 2013, aged 94.
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