Lessing arrived in England as a single mother with no formal qualifications, but rose to become one of the most important figures in post-war English literature. Read more: MI5 spied on Nobel winner Doris Lessing for 20 yearsįollowing the breakdown of her second marriage, Lessing left her two eldest children from her first marriage in the care of their father and his second wife and moved to England, taking her son Peter, a large collection of books, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing. She would spend the rest of her life confronted with questions about her decision to leave John and Jean in Africa. Their only child together, Peter, was born in 1947. It was as a member of the communist Left Book Club that she met and married her second husband, German refugee Gottfried Lessing.
In the wake of the divorce and influenced by the influx of European immigrants in Salisbury, many of them Jewish intellectuals who had fled the Nazi regime, Lessing experienced a political awakening. "There is no boredom like that of an intelligent woman who spends all day with a very small child," is how Lessing would later characterize this period. They had two children, John and Jean, before divorcing in 1943. There, at the age of 19, she married her first husband, Frank Wisdom.
Immersed in books sent over from a London book club, Lessing left school at the age of 14 and moved to Salisbury (now Harare) to work as a telephone operator. It was, by all accounts, an unhappy childhood for Lessing, who said she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't fighting or running away from the mother she hated in a cold, inhuman and provincial society she despised in equal measure. In 1925 the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize, but always struggled to make a living. Her mother, a nurse, met Lessing's father at the hospital in London where he was recovering from the amputation. Her father was nearly killed by shrapnel in 1917 and lost a leg. Unsentimental, provocative and uncompromising, Doris Lessing's formidable literary oeuvre wove together the threads of lived experience and world history with an unswerving commitment to the art of storytelling.īorn Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), Lessing would later come to realize that her parents had been "very much done in" by the First World War.