Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning, free-thinking, world-travelling and often-polarising author of The Golden Notebook and also a large number of additional novels, for example The Grass Is Singing and Memoirs of a Survivor has passed away at the age of 94.
The author of well over 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction as well as poetry, died peacefully at her home in London. Her loved ones asked for personal privacy, and the exact cause of loss of life was not instantly clear.
Lessing investigated topics starting from colonial Africa to dystopian Britain, from the mystery of truly being female to the unknown worlds of science fiction.
She won the Nobel Literature prize in 2007 and continues to be best known for The Golden Notebook, wherein heroine Anna Wulf uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating existence.
The paperback deals with a variety of previously unmentionable female conditions - menstruation, orgasms as well as frigidity - and also built Lessing an figure for women's liberation.
Published in Britain in 1962, the book would not get to France or Germany for fourteen years because it was regarded as far too inflammatory. Once it was republished in China in 1993, 80,000 copies sold to the market in only a matter of two days.
For a few readers as well as critics, however, the book was an undesirable exposure of female failings.
The complaints of Lessing's work prolonged all the way through her existence. Although she continued to publish at least every other twelve months, she acquired minimal consideration for her later works and additionally was often criticised being didactic as well as impenetrable.
Born Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919, in Persia (currently Iran) where her good old father was a traditional bank manager, Lessing moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) aged 5 and thus lived there until she was 29.
Strong-willed from the start, she read works by Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling by age 10 and existed by the motto "I will not." Schooled at a Roman Catholic young girls school in Salisbury (currently Harare), she left before completing secondary school.
At 19, she married her first spouse, Frank Wisdom, with who she had a boy in addition to a daughter. She abandoned that spouse and children in her early 20s and then started to be attracted towards the Left Book Club, a group of literary communists and socialists directed by Gottfried Lessing, the man who would turn out to be her second spouse as well as a parent to her third kid.
Nevertheless Lessing became disheartened with the communist movement and in 1949, aged 30, left her second spouse to move to Britain.
Along with her young son, Peter, she packed the manuscript of her very first novel, The Grass is Singing. The paperback, which used the tale of a woman who is stuck in a loveless relationship to convey poverty together with racism in Southern Rhodesia, was released in 1950 to fantastic success in Europe and the United States.
Lessing subsequently embarked on the first of five significantly autobiographical novels - from Martha Quest to The Four-Gated City - works that grew to become her Children of Violence collection.
Her nonfiction work ranged from Going Home in 1957 regarding her come back to Southern Rhodesia to a publication about her pets, Particularly Felines, in 1967.
In the 1950s, Lessing became an honorary active member of a writers' circle referred to as the Angry Young Men who were viewed as injecting a radical new energy into British ethos. Her home in London grew to be a focal point not only for novelists, playwrights as well as critics but in addition for drifters and loners.
Lessing herself always denied being a feminist and claimed she was not conscious of writing anything specifically inflammatory when she produced The Golden Notebook.
Lessing's earlier books decried the dispossession of black colored Africans by white colored colonials and criticised South Africa's apartheid system, prompting the government authorities of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa to bar her in 1956. Later government authorities overturned that order. In June 1995, the exact same calendar year that she received an honorary degree from Harvard University, she went back to South Africa to see her daughter as well as grand kids.
I have decided to include a younger photo of her as glory days are always best remembered when you are young. I will also try and find the Golden Notebook and make a post for people who have not read it yet.
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