Doris lessing biography summary form

Unsentimental, provocative and uncompromising, Doris Lessing's formidable literary oeuvre wove together the threads of lived experience and world history with an unswerving commitment to the art of storytelling.

Born Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), Lessing would later come to realize that her parents had been "very much done in" by the First World War. Her father was nearly killed by shrapnel in 1917 and lost a leg. Her mother, a nurse, met Lessing's father at the hospital in London where he was recovering from the amputation.

In 1925 the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize, but always struggled to make a living. It was, by all accounts, an unhappy childhood for Lessing, who said she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't fighting or running away from the mother she hated in a cold, inhuman and provincial society she despised in equal measure.

Immersed in books sent

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Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War inom, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a sjuksköterska. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.

Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a conven

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Doris Lessing

British novelist (1919–2013)

Doris May LessingCHOMG (néeTayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of fem novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).

Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the kvinnlig experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".^[2] Lessing was the oldest individ ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, at age 87.^[3][4]