Doris Lessing Popular Books

Doris Lessing Biography & Facts

Doris May Lessing (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983). Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, at age 87.In 2001 Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008 The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Life Early life Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Iran, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), both British subjects. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital in London where he was recovering from his amputation. The couple moved to Iran, for Alfred to take a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia.In 1925 the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize and other crops on about 1,000 acres (400 ha) of bush that Alfred bought. In the rough environment, his wife Emily aspired to lead an Edwardian lifestyle. It might have been possible had the family been wealthy; in reality, they were short of money and the farm delivered very little income.As a girl Doris was educated first at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in the Southern Rhodesian capital of Salisbury (now Harare). Then followed a year at Girls High School in Salisbury. She left school at age 13 and was self-educated from then on. She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology and began writing around this time. In 1937 Doris moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, civil servant Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John, 1940–1992, and Jean, born in 1941), before the marriage ended in 1943. Lessing left the family home in 1943, leaving the two children with their father. Move to London; political views After the divorce, Doris's interest was drawn to the community around the Left Book Club, an organisation she had joined the year before. It was here that she met her future second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter, 1946–2013), before they divorced in 1949. She did not marry again. Lessing also had a love affair with RAF serviceman John Whitehorn (brother of journalist Katharine Whitehorn), who was stationed in Southern Rhodesia, and wrote him ninety letters between 1943 and 1949.Lessing moved to London in 1949 with her younger son, Peter, to pursue her writing career and socialist beliefs, but left the two older children with their father Frank Wisdom. She later said that at the time she saw no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."As well as campaigning against nuclear arms, she was an active opponent of apartheid, which led her to being banned from South Africa and Rhodesia in 1956 for many years. In the same year, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, she left the British Communist Party. In the 1980s, when Lessing was vocal in her opposition to Soviet actions in Afghanistan, she gave her views on feminism, communism and science fiction in an interview with The New York Times.On 21 August 2015, a five-volume secret file on Lessing built up by the British intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, was made public and placed in The National Archives. The file, which contains documents that are redacted in parts, shows Lessing was under surveillance by British spies for around twenty years, from the early-1940s onwards. Her associations with Communism and her anti-racist activism are reported to be the reasons for the secret service interest in Lessing. Disaffected, and turning away from Marxist political philosophy, Lessing became increasingly absorbed with mystical and spiritual matters, devoting herself especially to the Sufi tradition. Literary career At the age of fifteen, Lessing began to sell her stories to magazines. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950. The work that gained her international attention, The Golden Notebook, was published in 1962. By the time of her death, she had published more than 50 novels, some under a pseudonym. In 1982 Lessing wrote two novels under the literary pseudonym Jane Somers to show the difficulty new authors face in trying to get their work printed. The novels were rejected by Lessing's UK publisher but later accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. The Diary of a Good Neighbour was published in Britain and the US in 1983 and If the Old Could in both countries in 1984, both as written by Jane Somers. In 1984 both novels were republished in both countries (Viking Books publishing in the US), this time under one cover, with the title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.Lessing declined a damehood (DBE) in 1992 as an honour linked to a non-existent Empire; she had previously declined an OBE in 1977. Later she accepted appointment as a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". She was also made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.In 2007 Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She received the prize at the age of 88 years 52 days, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third-oldest Nobel laureate in any category (after Leonid Hurwicz and Raymond Davis Jr.). She was also only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history. In 2017, just 10 years later, her Nobel medal was put up for auction. Previously only one Nobel medal for literature had been sold at auction, for André Gide in 2016. Illness and death During the late-1990s Lessing had a stroke, which stopped her.... Discover the Doris Lessing popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Doris Lessing books.

Best Seller Doris Lessing Books of 2024

  • Dissolve synopsis, comments

    Dissolve

    Nikki Gemmell

    'Every woman on Earth should read it' Caroline Overington, Weekend AustralianHaving lived through the humiliation and bewildering complexity of heartbreak in her twenties, Nikki Ge...

  • El quinto hijo synopsis, comments

    El quinto hijo

    Doris Lessing

    Un clásico de Doris Lessing, Premio Nobel de Literatura, sobre la desgracia que sorprende a una familia con la llegada de su quinto hijo, Ben, un personaje salvaje y brutal.En la d...

  • Doris Lessing synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing

    The Guardian

    Doris Lessing’s remarkable debut novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. In more than six decades since, she was written over 80 books and been awarded the Nobel Prize ...

  • The Four-Gated City synopsis, comments

    The Four-Gated City

    Doris Lessing

    "I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way, and it seemed to me that...

  • Love Again synopsis, comments

    Love Again

    Doris Lessing

    "She has revealed that brilliant kernel at the heart of it all that we recognize as the truth."  Francine Prose, Washington Post Book WorldLove, Again tells the story of ...

  • Rereading Doris Lessing synopsis, comments

    Rereading Doris Lessing

    Claire Sprague

    According to Sprague, doubling in Lessing's novels is a perfect correlative for the complexity and contradiction Lessing perceives as central to the private and collective human ex...

  • The Tale of Genji synopsis, comments

    The Tale of Genji

    Murasaki Shikibu & Royall Tyler

    The first complete new translation for 25 years of the acknowledged masterpiece of Japanese literature. Lady Murasaki's great 11th century novel is a beautifully crafted story of l...

  • Doris Lessing synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing

    Lorna Sage

    Doris Lessing was one of the most impressive, prolific and vital of twentieth century writers. Her fiction is obsessed with the workings of cultural change and she radically extend...

  • Doris Lessing and the Forming of History synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing and the Forming of History

    Kevin Brazil

    The death of Nobel Prizewinning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth and twentyfirstcentury world litera...

  • Casa Carlyle synopsis, comments

    Casa Carlyle

    Virginia Woolf

    Nel 2003 veniva pubblicato in Inghilterra un prezioso inedito di Virginia Woolf: un quadernetto di appunti scritto nel 1909 (un anno per lei molto difficile) e casualmente ritrovat...

  • The Modern Library synopsis, comments

    The Modern Library

    Carmen Callil & Colm Tóibín

    For Colm Toíbín and Carmen Callil there is no difference between literary and commercial writing there is only the good novel: engrossing, inspirational, compelling. In their sele...

  • On Cats synopsis, comments

    On Cats

    Doris Lessing

    Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semiferal creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination with the h...

  • A Tale of Four Dervishes synopsis, comments

    A Tale of Four Dervishes

    Mir Amman & Mohammed Zakir

    In despair at having no son to succeed him, the King of Turkey leaves his palace to live in seclusion. Soon after, however, he encounters four wandering dervishes three princes an...

  • Offene Fragen synopsis, comments

    Offene Fragen

    Vivian Gornick

    Die Grande Dame der amerikanischen Essayistik empfiehlt: Lasst Bücher in euer Leben – und lest sie immer wieder!Für die preisgekrönte Journalistin Vivian Gornick sind Bücher Lebens...

  • The Good Terrorist synopsis, comments

    The Good Terrorist

    Doris Lessing

    The Good Terrorist follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her id...

  • Doris Lessing synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing

    Alice Ridout & Susan Watkins

    Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her l...

  • Doris Lessing - A Life Behind the Scenes synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing - A Life Behind the Scenes

    Peter Raina

    In March 1949 the security service MI5 received notice of a suspect person about to enter Britain and went to great pains to keep her under surveillance. This person was the author...

  • Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing synopsis, comments

    Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing

    Graham Wolfe

    This volume posits and explores an intermedial genre called theatrefiction, understood in its broadest sense as referring to novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustaine...

  • The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories synopsis, comments

    The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

    Malcolm Bradbury

    This anthology is in many was a ‘best of the best’, containing gems from thirtyfour of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to c...

  • The Fifth Child synopsis, comments

    The Fifth Child

    Doris Lessing

    Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror storycentered on the birth of a baby who seems less than humanprobes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and D...

  • Study Guide to The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing synopsis, comments

    Study Guide to The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

    Intelligent Education

    A comprehensive study guide offering indepth explanation, essay, and test prep for Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, regarded by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as on...

  • The Inheritors synopsis, comments

    The Inheritors

    William Golding

    Hunt, trek, and feast among Neanderthals in this stunning novel by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies.This was a different voice; not the voice of the peopl...

  • Doris Lessing fra colonialismo e postcolonialismo. synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing fra colonialismo e postcolonialismo.

    Valentina Burcheri

    Doris Lessing ha vissuto fino ai trent’anni in Rhodesia del Sud (dal 1980 Zimbabwe), in seguito è stata esiliata dal paese per il suo impegno comunista contro il razzismo dei colon...

  • Shikasta synopsis, comments

    Shikasta

    Doris Lessing

    The first volume in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series is presented as a compilation of documents, reports, letters, speeches and journal entries, and purports to be a general ...

  • The Fiction of Doris Lessing synopsis, comments

    The Fiction of Doris Lessing

    Ratna Raman

    Doris Lessing (1919–2013), a prolific contemporary author, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 for her life work. Examining five decades of Lessing's unique life,...

  • A Proper Marriage synopsis, comments

    A Proper Marriage

    Doris Lessing

    An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities,...

  • Ben, In the World synopsis, comments

    Ben, In the World

    Doris Lessing

    Far from resting on her laurels, Lessing goes from strength to strength. Ben's halfhuman ignorance, paranoia, and rage are magnificently imagined and vividly present on every page....

  • Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook - an analysis synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook - an analysis

    Sabine Picout

    Another important characteristic feature which slips into Lessing’s novel repeatedly is the new way of treating psychological problems. Anna undergoes repeatedly psychotherapy and ...

  • Doris Lessing and the Forming of History synopsis, comments

    Doris Lessing and the Forming of History

    David Sergeant

    The death of Nobel Prizewinning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth and twentyfirstcentury world litera...