Peerless is level 1 of 4 in the Zimbabwe Hall of Fame: changed the field itself. Tell the country's story without them and the story breaks. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
She grew up in Southern Rhodesia and wrote The Grass Is Singing out of it, and half a century later took the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Doris May Lessing was born in Persia to British parents and brought to a farm in Southern Rhodesia at the age of five, where the family's attempt at maize farming failed slowly over twenty years. She left school at fourteen and educated herself out of parcels of books ordered from London.
She left for England in 1949 with a young son and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing, published in 1950 — a novel about a white farmer's wife and her black servant that looked directly at what the colony was, at a time when almost no one writing in English did. The Children of Violence sequence followed.
The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, was the book that changed things: a novel about a writer trying to hold her politics, her work, her sexual life and her breakdown in separate notebooks and failing to. It became one of the central texts of the women's movement, to Lessing's visible irritation — she insisted it was about fragmentation, not feminism.
Her communist and anti-apartheid politics made her a prohibited immigrant in Southern Rhodesia and in South Africa for decades. She wrote science fiction when that was not done by serious novelists, and in the 1980s submitted two novels under a pseudonym to prove how hard it is for an unknown writer to be published; both were rejected, including by her own publisher.
She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 at eighty-eight, the oldest laureate in the prize's history, and was told about it by reporters on her own doorstep as she got out of a taxi with the shopping.
She left for England in 1949 with a young son and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing, published in 1950 — a novel about a white farmer's wife and her black servant that looked directly at what the colony was, at a time when almost no one writing in English did. The Children of Violence sequence followed.
The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, was the book that changed things: a novel about a writer trying to hold her politics, her work, her sexual life and her breakdown in separate notebooks and failing to. It became one of the central texts of the women's movement, to Lessing's visible irritation — she insisted it was about fragmentation, not feminism.
Her communist and anti-apartheid politics made her a prohibited immigrant in Southern Rhodesia and in South Africa for decades. She wrote science fiction when that was not done by serious novelists, and in the 1980s submitted two novels under a pseudonym to prove how hard it is for an unknown writer to be published; both were rejected, including by her own publisher.
She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 at eighty-eight, the oldest laureate in the prize's history, and was told about it by reporters on her own doorstep as she got out of a taxi with the shopping.
- The Nobel Prize — Doris Lessing, facts
- The Guardian — Doris Lessing obituary
- Britannica — Doris Lessing
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