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.
Head-shot of Doris Lessing, with her grey hair pulled back, and wearing a colourful patchwork jacket.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Publishing Colette
This was translated into English by Charles King as The Mother of Claudine, 1937, before it became My Mother's House, and in 2006 Claudine's House, with an introduction by Doris Lessing .
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Norell, Donna M. Colette: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Garland.
63
Publishing Christina Stead
At the insistence of its first publisher, the US Simon and Schuster , CS agreed to transpose her Australian novel to an American setting. This entailed shifting the period from the 1910s to the 1930s...
Publishing Simone de Beauvoir
SB 's novel The Mandarins, translated by Leonard M. Friedman , appeared in English in both hardback and paperback, the latter with an introduction by Doris Lessing .
Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Gallimard.
171
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Publishing Anna Kavan
An event celebrating its publication, on 3 July at the London Review Bookshop , involved four authors including Doris Lessing and Virginia Ironside .
“Advertisement for London Review Bookshop”. London Review of Books, p. 27.
politics Naomi Mitchison
NM was in the Soviet Union again as a delegate of the Authors' World Peace Appeal ; one of her fellow-delegates was Doris Lessing .
Mitchison, Naomi. Mucking Around: Five Continents Over Fifty Years. Gollancz.
73-4
Norton-Taylor, Richard. “MI5 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal”. theguardian.
politics Margaret Drabble
She also remembered the rise of feminism: the books by Doris Lessing , Sylvia Plath , Nell Dunn , and Edna O'Brienthat would irreversibly affect women's destiny, and the pioneering of feminist journalism by Mary Stott .
Drabble, Margaret. “1960s”. The Guardian, pp. Weekend 25 - 31.
28
politics Olivia Manning
As to gender politics, though she admired the suffragists and felt strongly about women's rights, she thought of herself not as a woman writer but as a writer who happened to be a woman, and...
Occupation Eva Figes
EF had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood , Jane Austen , Elizabeth Bowen , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Frances Burney , Willa Cather , Colette ,...
Literary responses Naomi Mitchison
Brian Morton , reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, was intrigued but not wholly convinced. For Mitchison as for Doris Lessing , he remarked, the relation of myth to science demands a futurological setting...
Literary responses Maureen Duffy
Doris Lessing wrote that MD created the world of her early years so that one can feel, smell, and taste it.
Duffy, Maureen. That’s How It Was. Virago.
cover
Literary responses Olive Schreiner
The book is a landmark text. In an introduction to an edition of 1968, Doris Lessing (who first read it when she was fourteen) identified it as one of the few rare books ....
Literary responses Irene Handl
Almost all responses to this novel quoted on the cover of its 1985 reprint use somewhere the word original. The Sioux was welcomed at its first appearance by Noel Coward and by Daphne du Maurier
Leisure and Society Penelope Mortimer
Her garden at Chastleton was a great delight to her.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Doris Lessing , who met her at the end of her life, described her as entertaining a houseful of adolescent strays, and reported her as...
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Daniels
SD began writing after reading an injunction from Doris Lessing about putting one's life in order. Some fringe plays that she attended were absolutely dreadful, which made her confident that she could do better...
Intertextuality and Influence Elma Napier
Critic Elaine Campbell reads this novel as a precursor to Doris Lessing 's The Summer Before the Dark, 1973. Campbell sees EN 's courage—in writing a novel of a middle-aged woman's second chance at...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Lessing, Doris. “Sketches from Bohemia”. The Guardian, pp. G2, 4 - 5.
Lessing, Doris. The Cleft. Fourth Estate, 2007.
Lessing, Doris. The Diary of a Good Neighbour. Michael Joseph, 1983.
Lessing, Doris. The Doris Lessing Reader. Knopf, 1988.
Lessing, Doris. The Fifth Child. Jonathan Cape, 1988.
Lessing, Doris. The Four-Gated City. MacGibbon and Kee, 1969.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. Michael Joseph, 1962.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. Penguin, 1966.
Lessing, Doris. The Good Terrorist. Jonathan Cape, 1985.
Lessing, Doris. The Grass is Singing. Michael Joseph, 1950.
Lessing, Doris. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Jonathan Cape, 1982.
Lessing, Doris. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. Jonathan Cape, 1980.
Lessing, Doris. The Memoirs of a Survivor. Octagon, 1974.
Lessing, Doris. The Sirian Experiments. Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Lessing, Doris. The Story of a Non-Marrying Man. Jonathan Cape, 1972.
Lessing, Doris. The Summer Before the Dark. Jonathan Cape, 1973.
Lessing, Doris. The Sweetest Dream. Flamingo, 2001.
Lessing, Doris. This Was the Old Chief’s Country. Michael Joseph, 1951.
Lessing, Doris. Under My Skin. HarperCollins, 1994.
Lessing, Doris. Walking in the Shade. HarperCollins, 1997.