Doris Lessing

It's the birthday of novelist Doris Lessing (books by this author), born in Kermanshah in what is now Iran (1919). Her father had lost a leg in the British army and was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia. When Lessing was five years old, she moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father was convinced he would strike it rich farming maize. In fact, the family never made much money. Lessing said: "I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls — Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books."

Lessing's mother sent her to an all-girls convent school in the capital city, but she dropped out after one year and never went back to school. Instead, she continued to read everything she could. She left home to work as a nursemaid, then a telephone operator. She was married at age 19, had two children, divorced, married a second time, had another child, and divorced again. When she was 30 years old, she moved to London. She said: "I felt as if my real life was beginning when I at last arrived in war-torn, grubby, cold England. And of course, it was. Since then, I have written, that has been my life." A year after she moved to London, she published her first novel, The Grass is Singing(1950), set in the Rhodesia of her youth. She has written more than 40 books since then, including the novels Martha Quest (1952), The Golden Notebook (1962), Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Good Terrorist (1985), and Alfred and Emily(2008). In 2007, she won the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Golden Notebook was proclaimed a feminist manifesto and the bible of the women's movement.

In 2008, a critic wrote: "Nobel or not, some people still think of Lessing as either a one-book wonder, famous for her 1962 feminist classic, The Golden Notebook, or a literary version of a crazy bag lady, writing books about her cats and novels set on other planets."

Doris Lessing said, "A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away. A critic looks at the finished product and ignores the rush of a river that went into the writing, which has nothing to do with the kind of temperate thoughts you have about it. If you can imagine the sheer bloody pleasure of having an idea and taking it! It's one of the great pleasures in my life."