Doris Lessing - a writer full of 'fire and visionary power' - dies at the age of 94
The British writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, but the author of The Golden Notebook said she couldn't care less
Doris Lessing
1919-2013
Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning, free-thinking, world-travelling and often polarising author of and dozens of other novels that reflected her own improbable journey across the former British empire, died yesterday. She was 94.
Her publisher, HarperCollins, said the author of more than 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction and poetry, died peacefully. The exact cause of death was not clear.
Lessing explored topics ranging from colonial Africa to dystopian Britain, from the mystery of being female to the unknown worlds of science fiction.
She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. The Swedish Academy praised Lessing for her "scepticism, fire and visionary power". When informed about winning the prize outside her London home she responded: "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less." That was typical of the irascible, independent Lessing. The targets of her vocal ire in recent years included former President George W. Bush - "a world calamity" - and modern women - "smug, self-righteous".
She remains best known for , in which heroine Anna Wulf uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating life. The novel covers a range of previously unmentionable female conditions - menstruation, orgasms and frigidity - and made Lessing an icon for women's liberation.
Published in Britain in 1962, the book did not make it to France or Germany for 14 years because it was considered too inflammatory. When it was republished in China in 1993, 80,000 copies sold out in two days.
For some readers and critics, however, the book was an unwelcome exposure of female failings.
"This is pure political correctness," American literary critic Harold Bloom said in 2007 after Lessing won the Nobel Prize. "Although Ms Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable ... fourth-rate science fiction."
While Lessing defended her turn to science fiction as a way to explore "social fiction," she, too, was dismissive of the Nobel honour. After emerging from a London black cab, she was asked repeatedly whether she was excited about the award.
"I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise," Lessing said. "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."
Born Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919 in Persia (now Iran) where her father was a bank manager, Lessing moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) aged five and lived there until she was 29.
Leaving for Britain, she packed the manuscript of her first novel, . The novel, which used the story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to portray poverty and racism in Southern Rhodesia, was published in 1950 to great success in Europe and the US.
