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
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
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...
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 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.
73-4
Norton-Taylor, Richard. “MI5 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal”. theguardian.
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...
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 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...
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...
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
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

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.