Lessing, Doris (May)

Lessing, Doris (May), née Tayler (1919– ), novelist and short- story writer, born in Persia of British parents who moved to Southern Rhodesia; she left in 1949 with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950). Her quintet, Children of Violence, is a Bildungsroman, tracing the history of Martha Quest from her childhood in Rhodesia, through post-war Britain, to an apocalyptic ending in ad 2000 (Martha Quest, 1952; A Proper Marriage, 1954; A Ripple From the Storm, 1958; Landlocked, 1965; and The Four-Gated City, 1969). The Golden Notebook (1962) was hailed as a landmark by the women's movement. Later novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), enter the realm of ‘inner space fiction’, exploring mental breakdown and the breakdown of society. The sequence collectively entitled Canopus in Argus Archives (1975–83, 5 vols) marks a complete break with traditional realism, describing the epic and mythic events of a fictional universe with a remarkable freedom of invention. Other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985), about a group of middle-class revolutionaries, and Love, Again (1996), about the power of sexual passion in later life. The Fifth Child (1988), a nightmarish fable about the effect on an ordinary couple of an ugly and violent child, was followed later by a sequel, Ben in the World (2000).

She has written many other works of fiction and non-fiction, displaying her concern with politics, with the changing destiny of women, and with a fear of technological disaster. Among her works which show a similarly broad range of interests are Collected Stories (2 vols; 1978) and London Observed (1992, stories); and two volume of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Waiting in the Shade: 1949–1962 (1997). She also published two ‘romantic’ and realistic novels, Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could (1984) under the pseudonym of Jane Somers.