Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Explore the life and literary legacy of Doris Lessing (1919–2013), the Nobel laureate whose work parsed colonialism, feminism, politics, and the metaphysical—among the great voices of 20th-century literature.

Introduction

Doris May Lessing (née Tayler) was an English (British) novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, essayist, and biographer, born on October 22, 1919, and died on November 17, 2013.

She is best known for The Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence series, but her oeuvre spans social realism, psychological fiction, and speculative/sci-fi works grounded in mystical and sociological inquiry.

In 2007, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”

Below is a fuller portrait of her life, major works, themes, personality, and memorable lines.

Early Life and Family

• Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia (today Iran), to British parents.

• Her father, Alfred Tayler, was a bank clerk and war veteran (he had lost a leg in WWI), and her mother, Emily Maude (née McVeagh), worked as a nurse.

• In 1925, when Doris was about six, the family relocated to Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), where her father attempted farming on a large land parcel.

• The farm proved difficult, income was meager, and the mismatch between her mother’s romantic, Victorian aspirations and the harsh African bush conditions created tension in the household.

Education & Early Work

• Lessing attended a Dominican convent school and later a Girls High School in Salisbury (now Harare).

• At age 14, she left formal schooling and became self-educated.

• She left home around age 15, working first as a nursemaid, and then took clerical and telephone operator roles in Salisbury.

• She began writing early, selling stories to magazines when young.

Youth, Marriage, and Move to England

• In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury more independently and in 1939 married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant. They had two children: John (born 1940) and Jean (born 1941).

• The marriage was troubled, and by 1943 Lessing separated from him, leaving their children in his care.

• Her political engagement grew during this time: she joined the Left Book Club and later met Gottfried Lessing; they married around 1945 and had a son, Peter (born 1946).

• That marriage too ended, and in 1949, Lessing moved to London (with her younger son Peter) to pursue her writing and political interests; she left her older children in Africa.

• Over subsequent years, she was active in anti-apartheid causes and was banned from South Africa and Rhodesia in 1956.

• She broke with the Communist Party in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, gradually distancing from doctrinaire political positions.

Literary Career and Achievements

Early Novels & Breakthrough

• Her first published novel, The Grass Is Singing, appeared in 1950. This work dealt with race relations, colonial tension, and psychological conflict in Rhodesia.

• In the 1950s and 1960s she produced the Children of Violence cycle (1952–1969), a five-novel series chronicling the life of Martha Quest from colonial Africa into adulthood.

• Her best-known and most influential novel is The Golden Notebook (1962), often considered a landmark of feminist literature and psychological realism.

Phases & Later Works

Lessing’s work is often divided into three broad phases (though with overlaps):

1. Social/Realist Phase (roughly 1944–1956): engages issues of colonialism, class, race, politics, and early feminist concerns.

2. Psychological / Personal / Feminist Phase (c. 1956–1969): introspective works, exploring identity, fragmentation, women’s inner lives. The Golden Notebook, The Five Child, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Memoirs of a Survivor, etc.

3. Speculative / Sufi / Cosmic Phase (from ~1970 onward): Lessing turned toward speculative fiction, drawing on spiritual, mystical, and Sufi ideas in works such as Canopus in Argos: Archives.

• In 1982, she experimented with the pseudonym Jane Somers, publishing two novels (The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could…) anonymously to test how the publishing world treats unknown writers.

• Over her career, she published over 50 novels, in addition to short stories, essays, memoirs, poetry, and plays.

Honors & Recognition

• Lessing declined a Damehood (DBE) in 1992, finding it symbolically linked to colonial frameworks she disliked.

• In 1999 she accepted appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honour for her services to literature.

• In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• At the time, at age 87, she was the oldest ever Nobel laureate in literature.

Literary Themes, Style, and Legacy

Major Themes

• Colonialism & Race: Her African settings, particularly in The Grass Is Singing, explore the tensions, injustices, and psychological fractures of colonial life.

• Feminism and Female Psychology: Many of her works probe the fragmentation of women’s identities, the pressures of motherhood, the conflict between creative life and domestic roles. The Golden Notebook is paradigmatic in this regard.

• Political Idealism and Disillusionment: Her early engagement with communism, and subsequent critiques, appear in works like The Good Terrorist and through characters whose utopian dreams face harsh realities.

• Psychological Fragmentation and Narrative Multiplicity: Lessing often used multiple narrative strands, discontinuous structure, internal monologues, and metafictional techniques to reflect inner disjunctions.

• Spirituality, Mysticism, and Cosmic Scale: Later works project spiritual and cosmic frameworks (notably Sufi influences) onto human affairs, especially in speculative settings with planetary systems (e.g. the Canopus series).

• Time, Memory, and Identity: Throughout, her characters grapple with past traumas, memory’s distortions, and selfhood in flux.

Style & Approach

• Lessing’s prose is direct but capable of subtle complexity, shifting between realism, interiority, and visionary imagery.

• She often juxtaposes the ordinary world with uncanny or spiritual elements, allowing moments of transcendence or rupture to emerge.

• Her narrative voice can be authoritative, ironic, empathetic, and unflinching: she does not shy away from difficult psychological or moral terrain.

• She was not afraid to risk experiments: her use of pseudonym, crossing genres, or integrating speculative frameworks shows her restless literary ambition.

Legacy

• Lessing remains a central figure in 20th-century Anglophone literature, particularly within feminist, postcolonial, and speculative literary fields.

• The Golden Notebook is frequently taught in academic contexts as a landmark in feminist and modernist fiction.

• Her work influenced writers who combine political, psychological, and speculative concerns, particularly in women’s literature and speculative (SF) literature.

• Critical reception has grown over time, especially around her later work and her experiments in form and spiritual imagination.

Personality, Beliefs, and Later Life

• Lessing could be prickly about publicity and fame; after winning the Nobel Prize she reportedly said that the media attention “took all energy away” from writing.

• In her later years, she suffered a stroke, which limited her travel and public appearances.

• She remained intellectually active and continued writing into her late years.

• She died in London on 17 November 2013, aged 94, from kidney failure and complications (sepsis, chest infection).

Selected Quotes

Here are some memorable quotations attributed to Doris Lessing (translated or in original):

• “That is what writing is about, not the material, but the taste, and if the taste is right you can make almost anything work.”

• “Women afraid of ageing were once left with only two alternatives — face it or take a lot of harmfully stimulating, toxic stuff. I will accept it.”

• “Human beings live in symbolic environments, and it's the nature of our media, television, that they teach us to respond in certain habitual ways to the symbolism.”

• “The secret of happiness is to respect the metabolism that you are.”

• “It is certainly the role of the artist to make us feel something deeper and richer—and so the future of art is romance.”