Doris Lessing, the novelist who for six decades has been a fierce and wide-ranging chronicler of the rifts between men and women, black and white, and the self and society, has won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In making the award, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire, and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."
The prize, worth about $1.5-million and to be presented in December, is only the latest milestone in a career that has spanned more than half a century and touched on a range of current issues. Her prolific work has also been the subject of avid scholarship.
Ms. Lessing's experimental 1962 novel The Golden Notebook quickly established itself as one of the guiding lights of 20th-century feminism, but the author herself has been a reluctant feminist icon.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1982, Ms. Lessing observed that "What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion."
African Drums and Chopin
Ms. Lessing's biography is its own study in cultural and personal divisions, themes that she has explored time and again in her writing. The child of British expatriates, she was born in 1919 in Kermanshah in Persia (now Bakhtaran in Iran). In 1925 her father, a former British army captain, took up farming in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She would later describe her childhood in the bush as "the best thing that happened," and in a BBC interview recalled her mother's playing Western music on the piano while drums echoed outside. "As a child I didn't see any reason why they shouldn't be played together," she said. "You had to be much older to understand that African drums and Chopin weren't really part of the same phenomenon."
Ms. Lessing, however, developed a political consciousness early in life. At 14 she left school and went on to a variety of jobs, including stenographer, nanny, and journalist, before marrying Frank Charles Wisdom, in 1939. That marriage produced two children and ended in divorce in 1943. She met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, in a Marxist group concerned with racial activism; they had one son, Peter. When that marriage ended, in 1949, she and Peter moved to London, where she joined the British Communist Party.
The flight to England was motivated as much by politics as by personal turmoil. "No one who hasn't lived in one of these colonies knows just how stultifying they are," she later said. "What amazes me now is that I had the strength of mind to do it—because after all I was very young, I had no one to support me, I just knew I had to do it."
A Generality of Genres
In England, Ms. Lessing set about supporting herself and her son through writing. She published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, in 1950. She followed it in 1952 with Martha Quest, the first in "The Children of Violence" series (often called the Martha Quest series after its protagonist), which plays out in Africa and England. The other four books in the sequence are A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple From the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). The Swedish Academy described the Quest series as "pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman. With these books Lessing created a modern equivalent of the Bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century."
Ms. Lessing has refused to limit herself to any genre, experimenting with autobiography (Under My Skin, 1994, and Walking in the Shade, 1997); realist and experimental fiction; and what she has called "inner-space fiction," which she has used to explore ecological and nuclear catastrophe as well as the perennial theme of warring between male and female. She puzzled and frustrated many critics and longtime fans with some of her forays into the fantastic, including the "Canopus in Argos" series (1979-84), a study in what becomes of humanity after a nuclear apocalypse. That series also reflects an interest in Sufism, which she first encountered in the 1960s.
Among Ms. Lessing's other books are The Good Terrorist (1985); The Fifth Child (1988), a psychological cliff-hanger about family monstrosities; Mara and Dann (1999); and this year's The Cleft. "From collapse and chaos emerge the elementary qualities that allow Lessing to retain hope in humanity," the Swedish Academy commented in its award statement.
Oldest Winner Tells All
Ms. Lessing's work has been the object of intense critical interest over the years. A scholarly society is devoted to her work, and she has been the focus of many critical studies, but she and her many admirers might be forgiven for abandoning the idea that she would ever be recognized by the Swedish Academy. She will turn 88 this month, and is the oldest person ever to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
In August The Boston Globe asked Ms. Lessing why she thought she had not won a Nobel. She told a little story about being at a party in Sweden some time ago. "A little gray chap from the Nobel Committee sat down beside me and said, 'You'll never win the Nobel Prize. We don't like you,'" she said. "It was so graceless. What was I to say? I didn't say anything. I've never found out why they don't like me."
Apparently they do now.
