Dr. Russell Perkin, Department of English, gave a public lecture about the life and works of Doris Lessing at the Patrick Power Library on October 22, 2019. A book display accompanied the lecture.
Doris Lessing is one of the most important English-language writers of the twentieth century. Her novels played a significant role in the feminist movement in the 1970s. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Lessing was born Doris May Tayler to British parents in Persia, now Iran. Her father worked in a bank; he had been injured in the First World War, and he met his wife when she nursed him after his injury. In 1925 the family moved to a farm in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Lessing left school at the age of fourteen, and moved to Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia, where she was married twice, and had three children. With her second husband Gottfried Lessing, she became involved in the small local Communist party. When her second marriage ended, she moved to England with her third child, Peter, along with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which was published in London in 1950. She wrote a series of five novels between 1952 and 1969 under the collective title Children of Violence. They follow the life of a woman called Martha Quest from adolescence to the end of her life, and explore issues of gender and race. Martha’s story is loosely based on Lessing’s own life, though the end of the last volume, The Four-Gated City, is projected into a post-apocalyptic future.
Following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Lessing repudiated her commitment to Communism, and her later work is inspired by the teachings of Sufism. She re-examined her political commitments in her best-known novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), a work which has been important for many women writers. In 1974, Lessing published The Memoirs of a Survivor, a dystopian novel that describes the collapse of western civilization from the point of view of a middle-aged woman and a teenager who is mysteriously left in her care.
Much of Lessing’s later fiction rejected the conventions of realism. Some of it explored what she called “inner space”: the world of the unconscious and of mental disturbance. Another series of novels, Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983) is best described as science fiction. In 1984 she returned to a more realistic mode and to the realm of women’s experience with The Diaries of Jane Somers.
Lessing published a large number of books, and a complete bibliography can be found on Jan Hanford’s very useful website, Doris Lessing: A Retrospective. She was a great lover of cats, and wrote several books about them. Lessing is best known for The Golden Notebook, but she was also an outstanding writer of short fiction, and stories such as “To Room Nineteen,” “Our Friend Judith,” and “An Old Woman and Her Cat” are often included in anthologies.