Lessing, Doris 1919–

A British novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright, Ms. Lessing was born in Persia and raised in Southern Rhodesia, the setting for many of her earlier novels. Her overriding concern is with the search for self, and, for her sensitive portrayal of women who chart painful courses of self-discovery, she is considered an important feminist writer. For her fiction, Ms. Lessing has drawn upon her own conversion to Communism (since renounced), the racial situation in Africa, the theories of R. D. Laing, and extra sensory perception. She is the author of The Golden Notebook and the five-part Martha Quest series, The Children of Violence. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)

Doris Lessing is an old-fashioned novelist. Her kind of plot and characterization is anachronistic in a period when Julio Cortázar plays hopscotch with time, place and character, and Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass