Doris May Lessing

British · 1919 to 2013

Born Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia, to Captain Alfred Tayler, a former bank clerk who had lost a leg in the First World War, and Emily Maude McVeagh, the nurse who had cared for him at the Royal Free Hospital in London, she spent her first six years in Iran before the family moved to Southern Rhodesia in 1925 to farm maize on a thousand acres of bush. The farm never prospered. Her mother tried to lead an Edwardian life in the veld; Doris escaped into the books her mother sent for from England. She left school at thirteen, worked as a nursemaid, married the civil servant Frank Wisdom at nineteen, bore two children, and walked out of the marriage in 1943, leaving the children behind. The decision haunted and freed her in equal measure. She joined a Communist book club in Salisbury, married Gottfried Lessing, took his name, and arrived in London in 1949 with the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing (1950) in her suitcase. The Golden Notebook (1962) traced Anna Wulf through four colour-coded journals attempting to hold her divided life together and became a foundational text for second-wave feminism, a label Lessing distrusted. She wrote more than fifty books across realism, science fiction, and Sufi-inflected allegory, including the five Children of Violence novels and the five-volume Canopus in Argos sequence. In 2007, at eighty-seven, she became the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature; informed of the news by reporters on her doorstep, she set down her shopping and said, "Oh, Christ." She died at her North London home on November 17, 2013, aged ninety-four.