Doris Lessing

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.[7] 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.[8][9] The couple moved to Iran, for Alfred to take a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia.[10][11]

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.[12]

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.[13] 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[9] 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.[9] Lessing left the family home in 1943, leaving the two children with their father.[1]

After the divorce, Doris's interest was drawn to the community around the Left Book Club, an organisation she had joined the year before.[12][14] 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.[9] 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.[15]

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 in South Africa. 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."[16]

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.[17] In the same year, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, she left the British Communist Party.[18] In the 1980s, when Lessing was vocal in her opposition to Soviet actions in Afghanistan,[19] she gave her views on feminism, communism and science fiction in an interview with The New York Times.[10]

On 21 August 2015, a five-volume secret file on Lessing built up by the British intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, was made public[20] 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[21] to be the reasons for the secret service interest in Lessing.

At the age of fifteen, Lessing began to sell her stories to magazines.[22] Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950.[12] The work that gained her international attention, The Golden Notebook, was published in 1962.[11] By the time of her death, she had published more than 50 novels, some under a pseudonym.[23]

Lessing in 1984

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[24] was published in Britain and the US in 1983 and If the Old Could in both countries in 1984,[25] 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.[26]

Lessing declined a damehood (DBE) in 1992 as an honour linked to a non-existent Empire; she had previously declined an OBE in 1977.[27] Later she accepted appointment as a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service".[28] She was also made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.[29]

In 2007 Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[30] 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.).[31][32] She was also only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history.[33] In 2017, just 10 years later, her Nobel medal was put up for auction.[34][35] Previously only one Nobel medal for literature had been sold at auction, for André Gide in 2016.[35]

During the late-1990s Lessing suffered a stroke,[36] which stopped her from travelling during her later years.[37] She was still able to attend the theatre and opera.[36] She began to focus her mind on death, for example asking herself if she would have time to finish a new book.[17][36] She died on 17 November 2013, aged 94, at her home in London, predeceased by her two sons, but was survived by her daughter, Jean, who lives in South Africa.[38]

She was remembered with a humanist funeral service.[39]