Doris Lessing Biography Quotes 29 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Doris May Lessing (born Doris May Tayler) entered the world on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, then part of Persia (now Iran), to British parents stationed abroad. Her father, Alfred Tayler, had served in the First World War and later worked in banking; her mother, Emily, had trained as a nurse and carried a strong sense of order into family life. In 1925 the family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), seeking the promise of farming on colonial land. The realities of drought, isolation, and financial strain shaped the household and left their mark on Doris, who grew up amid vast landscapes, racial segregation, and the contradictions of settler society.

Formative Years in Africa
Lessing attended convent school and then a government school but left formal education at 14. She educated herself through voracious reading, absorbing European, Russian, and American literature alongside political pamphlets that circulated among the small colonial intelligentsia. She worked as a nursemaid, a telephone operator, and a typist while beginning to write short stories. In these years she witnessed the iron structures of colonial rule and the precarious lives of Black Africans with whom white settlers lived yet rarely mingled as equals. The tensions, hypocrisies, and emotional costs of the system would become central to her earliest fiction.

Marriages, Family, and Political Awakening
In 1939 she married Frank Wisdom; they had two children, John and Jean. The marriage did not last. Driven by intellectual hunger and political restlessness, she left the union and, controversially, the two young children, a decision that became part of her lifelong reckoning with motherhood, freedom, and responsibility. She gravitated to a circle of Left Book Club readers and activists in Salisbury (now Harare) and, in 1945, married Gottfried Lessing, a German-born communist refugee. They had a son, Peter. Politics, debate, and dissidence energized the household, but the marriage, too, ended in divorce. Gottfried later became a diplomat for East Germany and died in 1979 while serving in Africa. Doris retained his surname and, with Peter, sailed for London in 1949, determined to live by her pen.

Arrival in London and First Success
Lessing's debut novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), set in Southern Rhodesia, anatomized a tragic marriage across the fault lines of race, class, and climate. Its unsparing vision made her a new voice to reckon with. She followed with the Children of Violence sequence (beginning with Martha Quest in 1952), a bildungsroman spanning decades and continents through the life of Martha, whose struggles with desire, ideology, and historical catastrophe mirrored the mid-century search for meaning. She joined, and then broke with, the Communist Party as the abuse of power and the suppression of dissent around the Soviet bloc became undeniable. The governments of Southern Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa banned her for her outspoken opposition to racial rule.

The Golden Notebook and Feminist Reception
The Golden Notebook (1962) reshaped the literary landscape. Its protagonist, Anna Wulf, fractures her life into colored notebooks to hold political commitment, artistic ambition, love affairs, motherhood, and breakdown. The novel's formal daring and psychological intensity made it a touchstone for the women's movement, though Lessing resisted being restricted to any single label. She emphasized that the book examined the disintegration of mid-century certainties, the uses and betrayals of ideology, and the painstaking work of integrity. Its global readership turned her into one of the most prominent writers in English.

Experimentation and Later Work
Lessing refused to settle into a single mode. Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) mapped inner and outer cataclysms with speculative audacity. During the 1970s and early 1980s she immersed herself in Sufi ideas, especially through the writer and teacher Idries Shah, whose influence she acknowledged; the Canopus in Argos: Archives series (beginning with Shikasta in 1979) used interstellar empires to explore stewardship, empathy, and the fate of civilizations. Some critics balked, but Lessing insisted on the writer's right to surprise readers. In the mid-1980s she returned to contemporary realism with The Good Terrorist (1985), and then probed family dread in The Fifth Child (1988) and its sequel years later. Under the pseudonym Jane Somers, she published The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could... (1984) to expose how difficult it was for an unknown writer to find recognition; only after their modest reception did she reveal authorship, provoking debate about reputation and gatekeeping.

Autobiography and Nonfiction
Lessing's nonfiction broadened her legacy. Under My Skin (1994) traced her life to 1949, unsentimentally examining her parents, Alfred and Emily, and the colonial world that formed her. Walking in the Shade (1997) continued the story through the tumult of postwar London, the Cold War, and the creative breakthroughs of the 1950s and early 1960s. African Laughter (1992) recorded visits to newly independent Zimbabwe, mixing tenderness with dismay at the challenges of liberation. Her late book Alfred and Emily (2008) imaginatively rewrote her parents' lives as if the First World War had not altered their fates, followed by a memoiristic account that restored the historical record. Across essays and interviews, she reflected on aging, reading, and the moral responsibility of art.

Recognition and the Nobel Prize
By the turn of the century she was among the most translated living novelists in English, honored across continents. In 2007 the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising her as an epicist of the female experience and a fearless examiner of divided civilizations. News cameras famously caught her returning from the market, groceries in hand, when she learned of the award on her doorstep. At 88, she became the oldest recipient of the literature prize to that date, a capstone to a career that had moved from colonial margins to the center of world letters.

Personal Convictions and Final Years
Lessing guarded her independence. She could be wryly skeptical of institutions, including literary ones, and remained wary of being curated into a single idea. In London she balanced solitary work with a wide circle of acquaintances, but the most constant figures remained those closest to her life story: the long memory of Alfred and Emily, the absent-presence of her first children, John and Jean, and the companionship of her son Peter, with whom she had crossed from Africa and whose health preoccupied her in later years. She cared about the fate of Zimbabwe, opposed censorship and political cruelty wherever she saw it, and continued to reinvent her methods well into old age.

Death and Legacy
Doris Lessing died in London on 17 November 2013. She left behind a body of work that stretched from the drought-choked farms of her childhood to the speculative galaxies of her middle years and the intimate, unsparing reckonings of her last books. Her novels, stories, memoirs, and essays persist because they insist that private life and public history are inseparable, that the hungers of the mind and the demands of conscience cannot be neatly reconciled, and that a writer's task is to keep looking even when the world demands simple answers. Through the fates of characters like Martha Quest and Anna Wulf, and through the imagined chronicles of distant planets, she made a single, lifelong argument: that the examined life, however fractious, is the truest form of freedom.

Our collection contains 29 quotes who is written by Doris, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Wisdom - Truth - Justice.