Doris Lessing
(b. 1919)

Doris Lessing is one of the most powerful contemporary authors. Her novels and short stories explore the evils of racism, the role of women in modern life, the importance of intuition, and the limits of idealism in solving the problems facing society. Her books, profound and highly personal, confront a host of post-World War II issues, supplying almost a history of the times, with special emphasis on Africa and feminism.

The focus on Africa in Doris Lessing's work is not surprising. Born in Persia of British parents, she grew up on a 3,000 acre farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her parents raised maize with the help of native labor. She remained in Africa through two unsuccessful marriages, living principally in the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury, until she was 30.

She moved to London in 1949 and published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, the next year, having brought the manuscript with her from Rhodesia. Her African experiences provided the material for this deeply moving, highly acclaimed work. In an interview in 1962, Lessing commented, "I feel the best thing that ever happened to me was that I was brought up out of England. I took for granted kinds of experiences that would be impossible to a middle-class girl here."

The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, is her most renowned and technically sophisticated work. It represents a junction between the main paths her fiction has taken—her realistic, sometimes reportorial early style, and her visionary, at times apocalyptic, "inner space fiction" that came later. The dominant theme in The Golden Notebook is that of the free woman who struggles for individuality and equality despite her social and psychological conditioning.

A self-described "architect of the soul," Lessing is one of the most serious and intelligent of today's writers. Hers is a uniquely 20th-century odyssey. Writing is what she calls a "straight, broad, direct" manner. She has produced a remarkable body of novels and short stories, works that are distinguished not only for their breadth of subject matter but also for their breadth of vision.

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