Doris Lessing, 1919-2013, RIP

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose first novel, The Grass is Singing, ensured a life-long association with southern Africa, has died in London aged ninety-four, according to her publisher.

Lessing was a rebel child of the British empire and its colonies who returned to the metropolitan seat: born in Persia in 1919, raised in Rhodesia, she moved to London in 1949 brimful of radical politics and a mission to become a writer. Singing was published in 1950, but twelve years passed before her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook, ensured widespread interest and acclaim. Her final work was Alfred and Emily, a study of her parents and childhood.

• Doris Lessing on Wikipedia

Lessing came to the attention of world popular culture when the video showing her reaction to the news that she had won the Nobel Prize was posted to YouTube; “Oh, Christ,” she says:

Here is the Guardian’s obituary:

Born in Iran, brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe – where her 1950 first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was set – Lessing had been a London resident for more than half a century. In 2007 she arrived back to West Hampstead, north London, by taxi, carrying heavy bags of shopping, to find the doorstep besieged by reporters and camera crews. “Oh Christ,” she said, on learning that their excitement was because at 88 she had just become the oldest author to win the Nobel prize in literature. Only the 11th woman to win the honour, she had beaten that year’s favourite, the American author Philip Roth.

• Complete article: The Guardian
• See the Guardian’s Doris Lessing Slideshow

Here is Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in ’56, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north-west Zimbabwe in the early eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here “to help Africa,” as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen.

• Complete article: NobelPrize.org

Finally, here is an appreciation, in The New Republic, of The Golden Notebook:

Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook’ Was The Most Exciting Novel of The 1960s

In recent years the life of cultivated people has been marked by a fierce attachment to “personal values.” I put the phrase in quote marks to point toward something more problematic than the usual web of involvements that appear when human beings live together in society. The condition I have in mind—perhaps new for us, though hardly unprecedented—can be observed in the cosmopolitan centers of the West and increasingly in the more advanced totalitarian countries; indeed, everywhere but in certain underdeveloped nations which are forcing their way into history and therefore are still in the grip of a national mystique or total ideology.

• Complete article: The New Republic

Book details

• The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
  EAN: 9780435901318
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• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
  EAN: 9780007498772
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• Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing
  EAN: 9780007240173
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Image courtesy Telegraph