Through the Tunnel (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Doris Lessing was born October 22, 1919, in the country of Persia, which is now Iran. Her parents were English, and while Lessing was still young, they moved to Rhodesia, a region of South Africa which was then ruled by the British and has since been divided into the countries of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Her parents’ attempts at establishing a farm there were not successful and the family struggled with poverty for many years. Lessing was schooled in a Roman Catholic convent but quit at age 14 due to recurring eye problems. At the age of 20, Lessing married a civil servant, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children. In 1943 the couple divorced and two years later she married Gottfried Lessing, a German Marxist activist. Their son Peter was born in 1947.

Much of Lessing’s early fiction takes place in Rhodesia, even though she did not begin writing until moving to London, England, in 1949, following the end of her second marriage. Struck by the racial injustice she witnessed in Africa, many of her early books, including The Grass Is Singing and African Stories concern apartheid, Africa’s legalized practice of racial discrimination. Her strong belief in human rights led her to join the Communist Party in the 1940s, though she later repudiated the Party’s beliefs. Gradually, her fiction came to focus more on the emancipation of modern women, and her most well-known characters are portraits of women who seek liberation from confining societal expectations.

Though known primarily for her novels, Lessing has been one of the century’s top practitioners of the short story form, publishing such acclaimed collections as The Habit of Loving and Collected Stories I: To Room Nineteen. Her most famous work is the novel The Golden Notebook. The book is an experimental novel which can be read on many levels. The protagonist, Anna Freeman Wulf, attempts to integrate the experiences of her life, and thus herself, through four notebooks, which are juxtaposed with the novel that Wulf is writing. Many critics have written about this complex novel, and it is widely regarded as Lessing’s masterpiece. In 1954 it won the Somerset Maugham Award, and the French translation was awarded the Prix Medicis Award in 1976.

Toward the late 1970s, Lessing became disenchanted with her realist works, even though she was considered by many critics to be one of the English language’s most talented practitioners of realist fiction writing. She began writing a “space fiction” series called Canopus in Argos: Archives. The series concerns three different races of people who have found a way to produce immortal beings. Many critics have noted that Lessing’s science fiction evokes the overall feeling of a world on the edge of an apocalypse.

More recently, Lessing has published an autobiography, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize for Biography and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography. Through her long and varied career, Lessing has cultivated a reputation as being one of literature’s foremost voices on feminism, racism, and other social issues.