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
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...
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, 1981.
73-4
Norton-Taylor, Richard. “MI5 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal”. theguardian, 21 Aug. 2015.
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, 1993.
63
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, 21 June 2007, p. 27.
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, 1979.
171
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
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, 1992.
119
—to rise above personal difficulty. During her marriage she lived in hotels, one of them in Fort Victoria near the...
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...
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 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, 2004.
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 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, 1983, pp. 184-02.
189
Strachey, Ray. Millicent Garrett Fawcett. J. Murray, 1931.
55-6
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 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 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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Lessing, Doris. “Sketches from Bohemia”. The Guardian, pp. G2, 4 - 5.
Lessing, Doris. Spies I Have Known and Other Stories. Collins Educational, 1995.
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, 256 pp.
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 Pit. Phoenix, 1996.
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 Sun Between Their Feet. Michael Joseph, 1973.
Lessing, Doris. The Sweetest Dream. Flamingo, 2001.
Lessing, Doris. This Was the Old Chief’s Country. Michael Joseph, 1951, 256 pp.
Lessing, Doris. This Was the Old Chief’s Country. Michael Joseph, 1973.
Lessing, Doris. To Room Nineteen. Jonathan Cape, 1978.
Lessing, Doris. Under My Skin. HarperCollins, 1994.
Lessing, Doris. Walking in the Shade. HarperCollins, 1997.