Lessing, Doris May
Lessing, Doris May , née Tayler ( 1919 – ),novelist and short story writer, born in Persia of British parents who moved when she was 5 to a farm in Southern Rhodesia. She left school at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, then as a shorthand-typist and telephone operator in Salisbury. After the break-up of her first marriage she became involved in radical politics. She remarried in 1945 , but in 1949 left for England with her youngest child and the manuscript of her first novel to be published, The Grass is Singing ( 1950 ), the story of the complex relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant, and its violent conclusion. From this period she supported herself and her son by her writing. Her quintet Children of Violence is a Bildungsroman , tracing the history of Martha Quest from her childhood in Rhodesia, through post-war Britain, to an apocalyptic ending in AD 2000 (Martha...
[The entire page is 528 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
