Doris Lessing

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Standard Name: Lessing, Doris
Birth Name: Doris May Tayler
Married Name: Doris May Wisdom
Married Name: Doris May Lessing
Pseudonym: Jane Somers
The formidably productive and versatile DL , Nobel Prize winner, set her mark on late twentieth-century fiction and remained a force to be reckoned with in the twenty-first. Her major themes—life in colonial Africa, the problems confronting women (political, sexual, spiritual), human experience depicted through recourse to imaginary, extraterrestrial cultures—embrace most of the central concerns of her generation. As well as novels, short stories, science fiction, poetry, plays, essays, political analysis, travel books, and autobiography, she published light-hearted cultural satire and books about cats.

Connections

Connections Sort ascending Author name Excerpt
Travel Michèle Roberts
MR later remembered Bangkok for its bright colours, its heterogenous lives, and its pungent smells.
Roberts, Michèle. Paper Houses. Virago.
92-3
After her time working in South-East Asia, she spent some time travelling.
Michèle Roberts. http://www.micheleroberts.co.uk/index.htm.
She wandered with a friend, Sarah Dunant
Travel Margaret Drabble
Her travels (like those of Doris Lessing ) have included visiting China with a writers' group in 1993.
Athill, Diana et al. “Who am I? Who do I want to be?”. The Guardian, Vol.
review 2-4
.
Review 3
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anita Brookner
AB relishes all this. But she writes with tactful sympathy of Germaine de Staël and her younger, mostly unreciprocating lovers, and of Judith Gautier (daughter of Théophile ), who deserves to be remembered not only...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Michèle Roberts
This volume brings together pieces from various occasions and venues. In them MR discusses many of her favourite topics—the food, sex and god named in her title, the second and third often involving the relation...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
2
Textual Production Bessie Head
In 1984 BH was commissioned by Heinemann to write her autobiography. She felt she had plenty of records to work from, not for her South African youth but for her Botswanan maturity, and expected that...
Textual Production Hélène Barcynska
One of the earliest joint publications by Marguerite and Armiger Barclay was an anonymous sentimental novel which the Bodleian Library catalogue dates 1910, tentatively but improbably, since they did not marry till 1911. It is...
Textual Production Susan Hill
The anthology of British women writers she published in 1990 with Michael Joseph as The Parchment Moon: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories was reprinted the following year as The Penguin Book of Modern...
Textual Production Millicent Garrett Fawcett
To find out if her work would stand on its own merits, MGF , like Doris Lessing after her, tested the waters by publishing her next novel pseudonymously.
Oakley, Ann et al. “Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Duty and Determination”. Feminist Theorists, edited by Dale Spender, Reprint, Pantheon Books, pp. 184-02.
189
Strachey, Ray. Millicent Garrett Fawcett. J. Murray.
55-6
Textual Production Anthony Trollope
The Barsetshire and Palliser novels together make up only a small proportion of AT 's total of forty-seven full-length fictions. Unusual among them are Nina Balatka, 1867 (issued anonymously in an attempt—like Doris Lessing
Textual Features Alice Walker
This story (influenced, said AW , by the writing of Doris Lessing )
White, Evelyn. Alice Walker. A Life. Norton.
106
was a forerunner of much in Walker's work, particularly her uncomfortable habit of homing in on the tensions or pressure points...
Textual Features Fay Weldon
The book reveals a commitment to women's issues and a political agenda on the part of FW , who sees herself as participating in a didactic tradition. She resents the devaluation of women and the...
Textual Features Virginia Woolf
This work is not so much a diary as a working notebook: its seven sketches take events or issues from VW ' life as grist to (in Doris Lessing 's words) five-finger exercises for future...
Textual Features Lettice Cooper
This novel touches on the squatters theme which LC had used in Desirable Residence. Here the police receive an anonymous tip-off that unusual behaviour is going on at two large, dilapidated and divided Victorian...
Residence Muriel Spark
MS later wrote, It was in Africa that I learned to cope with life
Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Constable.
119
—to rise above personal difficulty. During her marriage she lived in hotels, one of them in Fort Victoria near the...

Timeline

1826: The Royal Society of Literature received...

Writing climate item

1826

The Royal Society of Literature received its charter; it had been founded several years previously.

17 February 1958: CND, or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,...

Building item

17 February 1958

CND, or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , was founded at a public meeting in London; it held its first march that spring, at the Easter weekend.

By late 1963: The best-known novel by US author Mary McCarthy,...

Writing climate item

By late 1963

The best-known novel by US author Mary McCarthy , The Group, appeared in Britain. It traces the later lives of a number of graduates of Vassar , then an all-women's college.

1977: Elaine Showalter published A Literature of...

Writing climate item

1977

Elaine Showalter published A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing, an important work in women's literary history.

By mid-October 1983: Ursula Owen, editor of Virago Press, published...

Women writers item

By mid-October 1983

Ursula Owen , editor of Virago Press , published with them an anthology of essays: Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.

9 December 2006-17 July 2007: The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted...

Writing climate item

9 December 2006-17 July 2007

The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of photographs of women writers, mostly novelists, from 1920 to 1960.

Texts

Lessing, Doris. A Man and Two Women. Granada, 1965.
Lessing, Doris. A Proper Marriage. Michael Joseph, 1954.
Lessing, Doris. A Ripple from the Storm. Michael Joseph, 1958.
Lessing, Doris. African Laughter. HarperCollins, 1992.
Lessing, Doris. Ben, in the World. Flamingo, 2000.
Lessing, Doris. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. Jonathan Cape, 1971.
Lessing, Doris. Collected African Stories. Michael Joseph, 1973.
Lessing, Doris. Collected African Stories. Flamingo, 1994.
Lessing, Doris. Collected Stories. Michael Joseph, 1978.
Lessing, Doris. Collected Stories Volume Two. Flamingo, 1994.
Lessing, Doris. Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. Jonathan Cape, 1983.
Lessing, Doris. “Each His Own Wilderness”. New English Dramatists, edited by Elliott M. Browne, Penguin, 1959, pp. 11-95.
Lessing, Doris. Five: Short Novels. Michael Joseph, 1953.
Lessing, Doris. If the Old Could . . . Michael Joseph, 1984.
Lessing, Doris. Landlocked. MacGibbon and Kee, 1965.
Lessing, Doris. London Observed. HarperCollins, 1992.
Lessing, Doris. Love, Again. Flamingo, 1996.
Lessing, Doris. Martha Quest. Michael Joseph, 1952.
Lessing, Doris. Martha Quest. Flamingo, 1993.
Lessing, Doris. “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize”. PMLA, Vol.
123
, No. 3, pp. 780-7.
Lessing, Doris. Particularly Cats. Michael Joseph, 1967.
Lessing, Doris. Play with a Tiger. Michael Joseph, 1962.
Lessing, Doris, and Charlie Adlard. Playing the Game. Harper Collins, 1995.
Lessing, Doris. Shikasta. Jonathan Cape, 1979.
Lessing, Doris. Shikasta. Flamingo, 1994.