Remembering Doris Lessing

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] look back at the life of Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winning novelist who has died at the age of 94 after writing on a variety of controversial subjects from feminism to social injustice.

The literary world is in mourning upon hearing the news that Lessing, one of the major figures in modern writing, has died peacefully at her London home.

She wrote extensively, producing more than 50 novels but also constructing plays, poems and short stories. With her career spanning the latter half of the twentieth century she used her works to shed light on its many absurdities.

Described as generous and open-minded, Lessing had a rich life, claiming at various stages to be a communist, socialist, feminist, atheist and finally a Sufi. She was fiercely dedicated to each of these beliefs and whilst she followed them she wrote heartfelt novels based on her experiences of them.

Doris May Tayler was born on October 22 in 1919 in Kermanshah, now western Iran, to British parents Captain Alfred Cook Tayler and Emily McVeagh. She described her childhood as lonely and miserable due to her overbearing mother. Her only means of escape was into the African bush, where she spent time exploring with her brother Harry.

As a result of such restriction in childhood she felt compelled to rebel during her teenage years, describing herself as a girl “who bulldozed her way through pieties”. In fact her 1952 novel Martha Quest drew clear parallels, painting the picture of a girl who was restless and bored, “tired of the future before it comes”.

Her parents sent her to an all-girls school in the capital, Salisbury but to annoy her mother she dropped out at the age of 13, ending her formal education. From then on she taught herself, reading the likes of Kipling and Dickens as well as making up bedtime stories for her brother. Influences also came from her father’s bitter memories of the First World War, to which she commented “we are all of us made by war…twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.”

At 22 she moved to Salisbury where she met her first husband, Frank Wisdom. The marriage lasted five years and bore her a son and daughter. She later married Gottfried Lessing and had her youngest son, Peter. Upon that union ending too, she announced “I do not think marriage is one of my talents.”

1949 was the year she moved to England with nothing apart from her baby son, £20 and her manuscript of The Grass is Singing, which was to become her first novel. The novel was published in 1950 and its popularity soared, being reprinted seven times in five months. Covering new ground in its description of an interracial relationship, it told the story of Mary, the wife of a poor white farmer in Southern Rhodesia who begins an obsessive and ultimately fatal relationship with her black houseboy. With this Lessing had created a name for herself and more books followed quickly.

It is argued that even if she had written nothing else, The Golden Notebook (1962) would have secured her a place in the literary hall of fame. Perhaps her most controversial work, it was a piece about “new women” which stretched the boundaries of realist fiction. Through the character of writer, Anna Wulf, Lessing was able to comment on the form of the conventional novel. By dividing the narrative between four notebooks, she mirrored her own portrayal of breakdown and mental disintegration. What she didn’t realise is that the novel was also considered to be a call for women’s liberation but she never intended it to be a feminist piece. Indeed American author Joyce Carol Oates told The Telegraph “For many Lessing was a revolutionary feminist voice in twentieth century literature – though she resisted such categorisation, quite vehemently.”

Lessing moved away from realism for a time and delved into the realm of science fiction with The Four-Gated City which focused on the paranormal, making telepathy a common occurrence. Loyal fans supported her during her sci-fi phase, others criticised her, claiming they wanted the old Lessing and her realism back.

She did return to realism but in a wholly unexpected way, writing under the name of Jane Somers, who was rejected by several publishers, including her own. Following this she considered herself highly successful in proving the world’s cold attitude towards new authors.

As well as being a remarkable novelist, Lessing was talented at short-story writing, some of her most skilled material being The Habit of Loving (1957) and To Room Nineteen (1978) both offering tantalizing glimpses into the hearts and lives of different people.

Her novels were not considered to be consistently good, critics calling some of her work “plodding” and “flat-footed” and dismissing her science fiction outright. However she defended it, saying “I’ll be damned if I can see any difference between some parts of The Grass is Singing and Shikasta” (often considered her worst novel).

In 2007 she returned to her north London home to find crowds of reporters outside her door. “Oh Christ,” she exclaimed upon learning that, at 88 she had just become the oldest author and 11^th woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Lessing’s final novel was Albert and Emily, released in 2008. Her publisher Pearson remarked: “That was a very interesting book for her, revisiting the early life of her mother and her father and how they had been touched by the First World War.”

Doris Lessing had a wonderfully rich life and her versatility as a novelist meant many are left mourning her passing. Her readers were fiercely loyal, tested at times by her eccentricity and perversity and by her eagerness to try different styles, sometimes ones that did not suit her. Despite setbacks she remained to be someone wrote passionately and truthfully, basing many of her ideas on her experiences or her beliefs. To this end she kept her readers encapsulated down to the very last word.