Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Biography

Doris Lessing was born in Persia, now Iran, on October 22, 1919 and died on November 17, 2013. Born with the name of Doris May Tayler, her parents were British. Her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925 they moved to Zimbabwe to have a prosper life, her father was not happy, he did not adapt to the rough lifestyle because his business did not work.

She did not have a very happy infancy; she described her childhood as a mix of pleasure and much pain. Doris had some difficult experiences. Her mother tried very hard to raise a decent daughter so she implemented some radical rules. Doris Lessing was sent to a convent, the nuns did not want her to stay there, and after that she was transferred to a girl’s high-school. When she was thirteen she abandoned school. Lessing acquired her knowledge by herself by reading books about many important and recognized authors like Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, among others; in that time she was not thinking about being a writer she just wanted to escape from home. She once said that miserable and unfortunate infancy produce fiction writers.

At the age of fifteen she left home, escaping from her mother and started working as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read. She also sold two stories to a magazine in South Africa.

Lessing believed that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. “For her, writing was a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."”

Time later she took a job as a telephone operator in Salisbury, there she met Frank Wisdom and married him, they had two kids, but she thought he would destroyed her so she left him leaving behind her two children. Doris became a member of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists. She met Gottfried Lessing an important member of the group. They married and had one son.

In 1949 Doris Lessing moved to London with her son and get divorced from Gottfried Lessing because of his ideals. That year she published her first novel The Grass in Singing; with that novel she started her career as a writer. Some of her novels were based in her personal experiences in Africa, her infancy and her politics and social concerns; also she wrote about the clash of cultures, the injustices and the racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience her books reflect her interest. The setting of her stories were in Africa during the fifties and sixties, they were about the social inequality between black Africans and white colonials. She accommodated what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical judgment".

Her greatest work was the Golden Notebook in 1962.

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