Doris Lessing, Nobel laureate, dies at 94
When Doris Lessing learned she was chosen as the 2007 Nobel laureate in literature, her response was less than joyous.
“I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise,” she told reporters outside her London home as she emerged from a cab with a bag full of groceries. “I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead …”
Famously outspoken, the diminutive grande dame of English literature was too old not to scoff at the honor: “a bloody disaster,” she called it later, which left her no time to write.
Lessing, whose richly imagined, scathingly perceptive novels helped define early feminism and the doomed idealism of the postwar generation, died Sunday in London. She was 94.
Her publisher, HarperCollins, announced her death, saying it was peaceful.
A school dropout at the age of 14, Lessing was known for her wide-ranging and impatient intellect, honed by her own keen curiosity, her grounding in two continents – southern Africa, where she grew up, and Britain, where she spent most of her adult life – and her insatiable appetite for books, including Russian novels, Moorish history, science fiction and Sufi mysticism.
She wrote more than 50 books of extraordinary range, exploring the social and political conflicts of her day, the colonial experience in Africa, the possibilities of extraterrestrial life – and most memorably, the conflicted recesses of the female heart.
The Nobel committee called her an “epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The divides Lessing plumbed were black and white, male and female, terrorist and socialite, even human and alien.
Her novels, short fiction, essays and memoirs explored her native Rhodesia – beginning with the 1950 chronicle of racial injustice and murder, “The Grass is Singing” – and her own early years as an idealistic, and eventually disillusioned, communist. Lessing more than once attempted to tackle the horrors of World War I and the devastating imprint it left on her family, and much later, she confounded her usual readers with a series of science-fiction novels, “Canopus in Argos,” reflecting her newfound conviction that space had become the new mythic terrain of human conflict.
But she is best known for “The Golden Notebook,” which in 1962 was an early and for many female readers life-changing chronicle of the multiple and maddeningly contradictory roles women must play in a world that usually defined the roles of marriage and children for them.
In her work, Lessing raised but didn’t necessarily answer the existential questions of women’s lives in the 1960s and beyond: Is it better to be married or single? How do you raise children and have a professional life? Is a woman denying her intellect if she longs for a man to love her? Why do older women still feel passion, and what is acceptable for them to do about it? If my life is so perfect, why do I feel as though I’m losing my mind?
She is survived by her daughter Jean and two granddaughters.