Lessing, Doris. (b. 1919).
W o r k
- early work: preoccupied with the growth of political awareness amongst native blacks and white settlers in colonial Africa
- later work: rejects conventional realism in favour of ‘inner space fiction’
> won the Nobel Prize for Literature (2007)
The Grass is Singing (1950):
- her first novel and an immediate sensation
- on political and social clashes between whites and blacks in Africa
Children of Violence (1952 - 1969):
- a 5-volume novel sequence
- on a young woman's developing political commitment and later disillusion
> The Four-Gated City (1969):
- the last and the most experimental novel in the sequence
- opens amid the political aspirations of British anti-nuclear campaigners
- concludes in the years 1995 and 2000 after a devastating atomic war
The Golden Notebook (1962):
- relates the concept of mental fragmentation to the disintegration of fictional form
- attempts to come to terms with an intelligent woman’s sense of private and public diffusion
- shapes the narrative around a series of notebooks kept by a woman writer trying to order different aspects of her life to fit in neat categories
- the protagonist's evolving perceptions of herself produce an inevitable but welcome formlessness: finds the private and public diffusion symptomatic not of social, mental, or ideological disease x but: of personal liberation
- conclusion: the protagonist fulfils her bids for freedom in a new value of a woman’s creativity
Canopus in Argos (1979 - 1983):
- a 5-volume novel sequence
- the novels qualify as science-fiction x but: emphasize social, cultural, and spiritual issues rather than details of scientific technology
- examine different societies at different stages of development
- focus on ‘accelerated evolution’ aided by advanced societies for less advanced species
The Good Terrorist (1985):
- a novel on the life of a well-intentioned squatter drawn into organizing acts of violence
- includes an essay analysing the novel's protagonist, setting, and language
The Fifth Child (1988):
- a novel with Gothic elements
- on the abrupt change in a happy couple's life after the birth of their fifth child who possesses strange, unprecedented qualities
Basics
(Lessing in 2006. Source: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Doris May Tayler. Married Lessing. (b. 1919). British. -
Work
Novelist. Short story writer. Nobel Prize winner (2007). Author of The Golden Notebook (1962). -
Genres
Modern fiction. Colonial writing. Psychological realism. Science-fiction.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Quote
"She was adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy: British, and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class; female and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past."
From Martha Quest (1952).