Doris lessing science fiction books

British novelist (–)

Doris May LessingCHOMG (néeTayler; 22 October &#;– 17 November ) was a British novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving in to London, England.

Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (–), The Golden Notebook (), The Good Terrorist (), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (–).

Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".^[2] Lessing was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, at age ^[3][4][5]

In Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature.

In The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since ".^[6]

Life

Early life

Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Iran, on 22 October , to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), both British subjects.^[7] Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital in London where he was recovering from his amputation.^[8][9] The couple moved to Iran, for Alfred to take a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia.^[10][11]

In the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize and other crops on about 1, acres (&#;ha) of bush that Alfred bought.

In the rough environment, his wife Emily aspired to lead an Edwardian lifestyle. It might have been possible had the family been wealthy; in reality, they were short of money and the farm delivered very little income.^[12]

As a girl Doris was educated first at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic conventall-girls school in the Southern Rhodesian capital of Salisbury (now Harare).^[13] Then followed a year at Girls High School in Salisbury.^[13] She left school at age 13 and was self-educated from then on.

She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid.

Autobiography books of famous people

Doris lessing autobiography books for third year

Autobiography books for children

She started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology^[9] and began writing around this time.

In Doris moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, civil servant Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John, –, and Jean, born in ), before the marriage ended in ^[9] Lessing left the family home in , leaving the two children with their father.^[1]

Move to London; political views

After the divorce, Doris's interest was drawn to the community around the Left Book Club, an organisation she had joined the year before.^[12][14] It was here that she met her future second husband, Gottfried Lessing.

They married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter, –), before they divorced in She did not marry again.^[9] Lessing also had a love affair with RAF serviceman John Whitehorn (brother of journalist Katharine Whitehorn), who was stationed in Southern Rhodesia, and wrote him ninety letters between and ^[15]

Lessing moved to London in with her younger son, Peter, to pursue her writing career and socialist beliefs, but left the two older children with their father Frank Wisdom.

She later said that at the time she saw no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."^[16]

As well as campaigning against nuclear arms, she was an active opponent of apartheid, which led her to being banned from South Africa and Rhodesia in for many years.^[17] In the same year, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, she left the Communist Party of Great Britain.^[18] In the s, when Lessing was vocal in her opposition to Soviet actions in Afghanistan,^[19] she gave her views on feminism, communism and science fiction in an interview with The New York Times.^[10]

On 21 August , a five-volume secret file on Lessing, built up by both MI5 and MI6, was made public and placed in The National Archives.^[20] The file, which contains documents that are redacted in parts, shows Lessing was under surveillance by MI5 and MI6 for around twenty years, from the earlys onwards.

Her associations with communist organisations and political activism were reported to be the reasons for the surveillance of Lessing.^[21]

Disaffected, and turning away from Marxist political philosophy, Lessing became increasingly absorbed with mystical and spiritual matters, devoting herself especially to the Sufi tradition.^[22]

Literary career

At the age of fifteen, Lessing began to sell her stories to magazines.^[23] Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in ^[12] The work that gained her international attention, The Golden Notebook, was published in ^[11] By the time of her death, she had published more than 50 novels, some under a pseudonym.^[24]

In Lessing wrote two novels under the literary pseudonym Jane Somers to show the difficulty new authors face in trying to get their work printed.

The novels were rejected by Lessing's UK publisher but later accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf.

Autobiography books of famous people: Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to and Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, -

The Diary of a Good Neighbour^[25] was published in Britain and the US in and If the Old Could in both countries in ,^[26] both as written by Jane Somers. In both novels were republished in both countries (Viking Books publishing in the US), this time under one cover, with the title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.^[27]

Lessing declined a damehood (DBE) in as an honour linked to a non-existent Empire; she had previously declined an OBE in ^[28] Later she accepted appointment as a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour at the end of for "conspicuous national service".^[29] She was also made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.^[30]

In Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.^[31] She received the prize at the age of 88 years 52 days, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third-oldest Nobel laureate in any category (after Leonid Hurwicz and Raymond Davis Jr.).^[32][33] She was also only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its year history.^[34] In , just 10 years later, her Nobel medal was put up for auction.^[35][36] Previously only one Nobel medal for literature had been sold at auction, for André Gide in ^[36]

Illness and death

During the lates Lessing had a stroke,^[37] which stopped her from travelling during her later years.^[38] She was still able to attend the theatre and opera.^[37] She began to focus her mind on death, for example asking herself if she would have time to finish a new book.^[17][37] She died on 17 November , aged 94, at her home in West Hampstead, London, of kidney failure, sepsis and a chest infection,^[39] predeceased by her two sons, but was survived by her daughter, Jean, who lives in South Africa.^[40]

She was remembered with a humanist funeral service.^[41]

Fiction

Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases.

During her Communist phase (–56) she wrote radically about social issues, a theme to which she returned in The Good Terrorist (). Doris Lessing's first novel, The Grass Is Singing, as well as the short stories later collected in African Stories, are set in Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) where she was then living.^[43]

This was followed by a psychological phase from to , including the Golden Notebook and the "Children of Violence" quintet.^[44]

Third came the Sufi phase, explored in her 70s work, and in the Canopus in Argos sequence of science fiction (or as she preferred to put it "space fiction") novels and novellas.^[45]

Lessing's Canopus sequence received a mixed reception from mainstream literary critics.

John Leonard praised her novel The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five in The New York Times,^[46] but in John Leonard wrote in reference to The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 that "[o]ne of the many sins for which the 20th century will be held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs.

Lessing She now propagandises on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic razzmatazz",^[47] to which Lessing replied: "What they didn't realise was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like Blood Music, by Greg Bear. He's a great writer."^[48] She attended the World Science Fiction Convention as its Writer Guest of Honor.

Here she made a speech in which she described her dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor as "an attempt at an autobiography".^[49]

The Canopus in Argos novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution of other worlds, including Earth. Using Sufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mids by her "good friend and teacher" Idries Shah,^[42] the series of novels also uses an approach similar to that employed by the early 20th-century mystic G.

I. Gurdjieff in his work All and Everything. Earlier works of "inner space" fiction like Briefing for a Descent into Hell () and Memoirs of a Survivor () also connect to this theme. Lessing's interest had turned to Sufism after coming to the realisation that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her disillusioned.^[50]

Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars,^[51] but notably not by the author herself, who later wrote that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one's self from illusions had been overlooked by critics.

She also regretted that critics failed to appreciate the exceptional structure of the novel. She explained in Walking in the Shade that she modelled Molly partly on her good friend Joan Rodker, the daughter of the modernist poet and publisher John Rodker.^[52]

Lessing did not like being pigeonholed as a feminist author.

When asked why, she explained:

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women?

In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.

—&#;Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July ^[10]

Doris Lessing Society

The Doris Lessing Society is dedicated to supporting the scholarly study of Lessing's work. The formal structure of the Society dates from January , when the first issue of the Doris Lessing Newsletter was published.

In the Newsletter became the academic journal Doris Lessing Studies. The Society also organises panels at the Modern Languages Association (MLA) annual Conventions and has held two international conferences in New Orleans in and Leeds in ^[53]

Archives

Lessing's literary archive is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin.

The 45 archival boxes of Lessing's materials at the Ransom Center contain nearly all of her extant manuscripts and typescripts up to Original material for Lessing's early books is assumed not to exist because she kept none of her early manuscripts.^[54] The McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa holds a smaller collection.^[55]

The University of East Anglia's British Archive for Contemporary Writing holds Doris Lessing's personal archive: a vast collection of professional and personal correspondence, including the Whitehorn letters, a collection of love letters from the s, written when Lessing was still living in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia).

Doris lessing wins nobel prize in literature

Doris lessing society

Doris lessing books in order

Doris lessing short stories

The collection also includes forty years of personal diaries. Some of the archive remains embargoed during the writing of Lessing's official biography.^[56]

Awards

Publications

See also

References

Further reading

External links