I read Doris Lessing for my English degree and realised that she could write about the depths of human misery that many people erroneously believe is only their lot in life. She could relate because she spent a large part of her life fighting against and mentally returning again and again to captivity. Born in Persia and raised in Rhodesia, she spent her teenage trying to escape her mother and home. Marrying at 19 to achieve this end, she could not endure a life of intellectual isolation and left her husband and two children to make a life for herself. In her own words, she did not want to end up like her mother — a woman who had to choose between a prestigious nursing career and having a family of her own. Having chosen the latter, Lessing’s mother eventually moved to South Africa with her husband, a shattered veteran of the Great War. In the first volume of her autobiography, Lessing wrote, “Do I believe [my] difficult birth scarred me — that is to say, my nature? Who knows? I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard and people were dying in millions all over the world — that was important.” World War I hung over their lives and made home life a misery, and thus was born the urge to escape and start over.
Once she left her marriage and her country behind, Lessing was finally able to see Rhodesia, with its concerns with white supremacy, from the outside. She saw its misogyny and racism, and was horrified. Lessing, at this point, was also struggling with what she identified as the gulf between what girls were taught they could become and the real expectations her society had of them in terms of matrimony and maternalism. The concern with maintaining the status quo both in terms of race and gender finds its way into her first novel The Grass Is Singing. The book follows the psychological stream of its protagonist, Mary Turner, through marriage, desperate circumstances, a new awareness of racial difference and finally towards death. A superb portrayal of intense emotion, the book shows a glimpse of the life Lessing’s mother had had to live and the one that she had escaped with great difficulty. Recalling Flaubert’s characterisation of Emma Bovary, the novel shows the desperate depression of its female protagonist, a depression at being trapped in a loveless marriage that few people are honest enough to acknowledge.
Lessing’s honesty is famous. Being declared persona non grata by her country for her attacks on its racism, she refused to be daunted and used the observations and experiences of her youth in novels, essays and short stories to show the brutal unfairness of her homeland’s practices. The same honesty and clarity of vision was applied when she described the inner workings of her female characters’ lives. Her book The Golden Notebook is one such example. It follows the thoughts of Anna Wulf, and lays bare the experiences and emotions that lie beneath the surface. This novel came under heavy fire, drawing criticism and praise from many quarters. It has been labelled both feminist and slightly homophobic, and its experimental form has been subject to both reductive and laudatory criticism. What shines through in this book, above all else though, is Lessing’s intense desire for honesty. She shows, through Anna’s efforts, that the suppression of the truth leads to mental blocks and the collapse of a person’s identity.
The character compartmentalises each stage of her experiences into different notebooks. This exercise is as true today as it was at the time that the book was published in 1962. There are Anna Wulf the struggling writer, the divorcee, the single parent and the friend — all divided into notebooks of different colours. For many women, this was the perspective that appealed the most. They saw (and still see) themselves reflected in Anna’s attempts to break past her mental barriers by cataloguing the disparate aspects of her personality. Although Lessing vehemently rejected the label of “feminist writer”, the Swedish academy, when awarding her the Nobel Prize at the age of 88 (the oldest writer to receive it), was not wrong in stating that she was “the epicist of the female experience”.
Doris Lessing passed away on November 17, 2013, at the age of 94, after a life well-lived and well-written.
The author has a degree in English Literature and is currently being trained as a civil servant. She may be reached at [email protected]