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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Virginia Woolf
Most immediate comment on the appearance of this writing focussed, predictably, on accusations and defences about anti-Semitism. Lessing , however, produced a thoughtful piece which touches on Woolf's wider achievements and influence (particularly on women...
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 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 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
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...
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...
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 ....
Intertextuality and Influence Olive Schreiner
To Vera Brittain and some of her contemporaries, Women and Labour was the Bible of the Women's Movement. It influenced the writings of many early-twentieth-century feminists, including historian Alice Clark and suffragette Constance Lytton
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
Friends, Associates Michèle Roberts
MR 's memoir, Paper Houses, features a huge roster of close friends warmly evoked, some of them long-term commitments and others belonging to some particular period of her life. They include many women who...
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...
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...
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...
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.

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.