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Doris Lessing is a TCK who won 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature

miyon

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miyon

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Profile: Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Lessing was born in Persia and grew up on a farm in southern Africa

Doris Lessing, who has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature has been one of Britain’s most prominent writers for more than 50 years. Her novels, most notably The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, weave political and sexual themes into a complex narrative thread.

Lessing’s themes are big ones: racism, communism, terrorism and environmental destruction.

Her output ranges from romances through to science fiction and take in the most intimate internal dialogues and sweeping historical set-pieces.

Doris May Taylor is a child of the British Empire. Born in Persia - now Iran - in 1919, she was brought up in Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - where her father owned a farm.

Her African childhood, amid the vastness of the bush and her time at convent schools, brought her a wealth of inspiration.

In 1949 after two failed marriages, the second to a hard-line communist, Gottfried Lessing, she left Africa, and most of her family, and moved to London to try her hand at writing.

Multi-layered tales

Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing, published the following year, was an instant bestseller.

The story of the wife of a white farmer and her affair with an African servant, the book broke new ground, both in terms of its outlining of an interracial relationship and in the sheer detail Lessing gave to her characters’ internal lives.

Perhaps Lessing’s most controversial novel was The Golden Notebook, published in 1962.

A multi-layered story about the different areas of one woman’s personality, her passions and hatreds, it is by far the most complex, and longest, work Lessing has ever produced.

Doris Lessing

Lessing has written more than 30 novels

She has also produced startling works, such as the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), a frightening and surreal examination of mental illness.

By the late 1970s, Lessing left the African-themed novel behind and moved into science fiction.

In the Canopus in Argos series, she outlines a dystopic vision of the future, with natural catastrophes and tyranny becoming the norm.

The critic, Paul Schlueter, noted that Lessing’s “high seriousness in describing Earth’s own decline and ultimate demise is as profoundly apocalyptic as ever”.

More recently, Lessing has produced novels like The Good Terrorist (1985), a satire on romantic politics, and The Fifth Child (1988), about the havoc wreaked on a family by an antisocial and violent child.

Her latest work, The Cleft, is a sci-fi novel which imagines what happens to a mythical all-female world when men are introduced.

Speaking at the Hay literary festival in June, Lessing said the book had been partly inspired by her own experience of giving birth at 19 and the woman in the next bed, already a mother of two girls, harshly rejecting the son she had just had.

The writer also addressed her critics - saying she had been surprised by the “horrible” early reviews of The Golden Notebook.

“There’s something abrasive in me because I have often made people very cross,” she mused.

But she said as a writer it was important not to care what other people think and that the profession must honour that.

“We are free… I can say what I think. We are lucky, privileged, so why not make use of it?”

(source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7039539.stm)

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I wonder if her TCK experience has contributed a big portion to her literature.


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May 14, 2008 | Filed Under Articles 

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2 Responses to “Doris Lessing is a TCK who won 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature”

  1. 1
    Brice
    Brice Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 11:54 pm

    Interesting! Thanks for sharing that Miyon. :)

    Here’s the book:

    Marriage can’t get worse than this

    When a colonial woman with a not unconventional upbringing who is not the luckiest person, decides to go for broke and marries as she is getting on, what could happen?

    The anatomy of the master servant bond is one of the main themes of this book. Before welfare systems, all cultures had master servant relationships as the rich employed servants. The master servant relationship was stark in colonial Africa. The masters had to know the natives so that they could get work out of them and a certain amount of loyalty but the masters in Africa also had to keep the natives down, almost like animals, so that they could remain the masters and the servants could remain servants.

    The natives of course as servants, could also benefit as underdogs as all servants do, being loyal, friendly and pleasing but not above their masters. Mary in the book, starts with preconceptions about her relationship to the Africans, and as things get from bad to worse, she if faced with a mistress servant relationship going horribly wrong.

    Her husband is a fool, tied to the land and unable to organise his ambitions or get anything out of his farm. She knows better, but luck is never on their side. One actually has a respect for Mary and her penetrative intelligence, but the book describes how this very human intelligence with its stiff attitudes (she marries when she understands people are sniggering about her behind her back, in any case, women at the time did not have much choice in this), breaks down, collapses utterly.

    Harrowing, hot hot weather with the dry beauty of Africa described by a veteran. This is a book that unravels in your hand and is a literary masterpiece for a first novel.

    Lessing describes herself as a colonist and is known to be unconventional and vaguely feminist. She displays a keen erudition of the issues, language and sights of her once native Africa - and brings it home. ”

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060953462/84-20/

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  2. 2
    miyon
    miyon Says:
    May 16th, 2008 at 10:36 am

    Thanks for the info Brice! I guess she did talk about events and lifestyles unique to the places in Africa she’s lived!

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