Doris Lessing: a life of writing and commitment to emancipation

What is the connection between Doris Lessing and Female Emancipation?

In her novels, short stories, essays, autobiographical works Doris Lessing has already written about the condition of women, their rights, the necessity of their total emancipation. She has fought against any kind of inequality, for the vital freedom of all human beings. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 as a female chronicler, "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power had subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.

Childhood and Education of Doris

Doris Lessing (born Doris May Tayler) was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents. Her father was a bank manager, whilst her mother had been a nurse. When she was six, her parents obtained a grant from the British government and moved to the Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); but the maize farm they had bought did not give them the promised wealth, but only the rough life of an African settlement.

Early Works and Personal Life

At the age of seven Doris was sent to a Roman Catholic convent school, and later to Salisburg High School for Girls, which she left at the age of fourteen, although continuing her individual education. Ordering books from England, she read all the 19th -century English authors but also discovered Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
When she was fifteen, she left her family and worked as a nurse, already beginning to write stories. In 1937 she moved to Salisbury and worked for a year as a telephone operator. From the age of eighteen she worked in the Rhodesian Parliament for the non racist left-wing party. At nineteen she married and had two children but a few years later, in 1943, she divorced, left her family and joined a Communist group. After her divorce from her first husband, she married a German political activist in the group, Gottfried Lessing (the surname she used as a writer), and had a child, Peter. She never thought that marriage and motherhood could imply an end to her life as a writer. She always believed that this activity would give her a freedom that most people could not even imagine. In 1949 she divorced, left Salisbury and moved to London ith her youngest son and, in 1950, she published her first novel, The Grass is singing, acritique of racial politics in Rhodesia. In 1956, because of her outspoken opposition to apartheid and her left-wing opinions, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and Southern Africa. She has worked in all literary genres: the novel, the short story, science fiction, the essay, autobiography. She has always stated that she "must" write as she feels, and has always felt that, if she stopped writing, she would have wasted her life.

Recognition and Literary Impact

Doris Lessing is considered one of the most important writers of our day. In her many works, she has given a masterful portraiture of the thoughts, anxieties, aspirations, hopes and fears, joys and sorros of contemporary times.