Doris Lessing Analysis

Doris Lessing’s many books include poetry, memoirs, reportage, plays, essays, and reviews. She is best known, however, for her novels, particularly The Golden Notebook (1962), and the five-volume Children of Violence series, which includes Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). She explored the genre she terms “space fiction” in the volumes Shikasta (1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), as well as “inner space fiction” in novels such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). In the mid-1980’s, she returned to more realistic fiction, publishing, among others, two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers. In the 1990’s Lessing published the novels Playing the Game (1995), Love, Again (1996), and Mara and Dann (1999), as well as the dramatic Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays (pb. 1996) and the autobiographical Walking in the Shade (1997).

Doris Lessing was a finalist for the Booker McConnell Prize for Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Sirian Experiments, and The Good Terrorist (1985). She was nominated for the Australian Science-Fiction Achievement Award in 1982 for The Sirian Experiments. The Good Terrorist won her the W. H. Smith and Son Literary Award, the Palermo Prize, and the Premio Internazionale Mondello. In 1995 the nonfiction Under My Skin (1994) earned the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Walking in the Shade received a nomination for the 1997 National Book Critics Award in the biography/autobiography category. Lessing has been a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition to her works of long fiction, Doris Lessing has published numerous volumes of short stories. She has also published a volume of poetry and has written memoirs, documentaries, essays, reviews, plays, and librettos for operas.

Doris Lessing has been one of the most widely read and influential novelists of the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Her works have been translated into many languages and have inspired critical attention around the globe. Generally serious and didactic, Lessing’s fiction repeatedly urges the human race to develop a wider consciousness that will allow for greater harmony and less violence. Although known particularly as a master of realism, Lessing is often experimental or deliberately fantastic, as shown in her science-fiction novels. Her interests are wide-ranging, from Marxism and global politics to the mystical teachings of Sufism to the small personal voice of the individual.

In 1999, Lessing was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (a British honor for those who have done “conspicuous national service”), and in 2001, the Royal Society of Literature named her a Companion of Literature. Among the numerous awards Lessing has received are the Somerset Maugham Award, the German Shakespeare Prize, the Austrian Prize for European Literature, and the French Prix Médicis for Foreigners. In 1995, she won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). In 1999, she received Spain’s Premi Internacional Catalunya; in 2001, the David Cohen British Literary Prize as well as Spain’s Premio Príncipe de Asturias; and in 2002, the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award. In 2007, Lessing was awarded the world’s most prestigious honor for literary authors, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In what ways did Doris Lessing’s knowledge of the veld animate her fiction?

Summarize Lessing’s insights into the relationship between blacks and whites.

Lessing’s Martha Quest had a tendency to repeat some of her mistakes. What evidences of maturation do you see as her career develops?

Compare the sexual attitudes of Quest and Anna Wulf.

Does Lessing’s career suggest a conviction that only by becoming a member of a collective or of a sexual relationship can one understand such relationships?

Did the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Lessing in 2007 depend more on the short fiction than on her sequences of novels?