Doris Lessing
(1919 -)
(Born Doris May Taylor; has also written under the pseudonym Jane Somers) Persian-born English novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, poet, nonfiction writer, autob...
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Biography EssayDoris Lessing burst upon the British literary scene in 1950 with her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and she has remained at the top ever since. In the past four decades, her work ...
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Doris Lessing (born 1919) was a South African expatriate writer known for her strong sense of feminism. A short story writer and novelist, as well as essayist and critic, Lessing was deeply concerned ...
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Doris Lessing, whose long career as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist began in the mid-twentieth century, is considered among the most important writers of the modern postwar era. Since her...
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[This entry was updated by Paul Schlueter from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 228-254.]Doris Lessing burst upon the British literary scene in 1950 wit...
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Doris Lessing's literary career spans more than four decades; consequently her texts, both fiction and nonfiction, are valuable at the most basic level as historical records that tackle the central po...
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In the following review, Newson explores the parallels between African Laughter and Lessing's experiences in Africa.
African Laughter is an alchemy of memoir, travelogue, revisionist history, a...
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In the following review, Miller and Showalter compare Walking in the Shade to Under My Skin, examining Lessing's literary achievements, particularly her contribution to feminist scholarship.
Do...
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In the following review, Powers refutes several widespread critical opinions of Walking in the Shade.
It would be interesting to know how many of those who purchase Doris Lessing's turgid novel...
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In the following excerpt, Kalnins outlines the narrative structure of Walking in the Shade, briefly describing Lessing's career.
‘If you travel from the southern frontier of the Sudan to...
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In the following review, Clark faults Lessing's characterization and prose style in Mara and Dann.
When Doris Lessing subtitles a book An adventure, you know that the stories that follow will n...
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In the following review, Chettle details the plot of Mara and Dann, with particular attention to Lessing's characterization of the protagonist within the context of feminist realism.
At 79, Dor...
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In the following interview, Lessing discusses her observations on feminism, the 1960s, fame, and spiritual fads, as well as her thoughts on privacy, death, and the end of the twentieth century.
Fifty ...
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In the following review, Knapp focuses on the heroine's role in the narrative development of Mara and Dann.
As if to insist on a perspective that makes the year 2000 appear trivial, Doris Lessi...
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In the following review, France highlights the fable-like characteristics of the plot of Ben, in the World.
Twelve years ago, Doris Lessing published a cautionary tale about a kind, liberal couple wit...
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In the following excerpt, Bush offers a description of the protagonist in Ben, in the World.
In her new novel [Ben, in the World], Doris Lessing gives a fresh twist to an old idea: What would our worl...
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In the following essay, Rowland contrasts Lessing's early political and artistic conceptions of “representation” with the thematic implications of Canopus in Argos.
Doris Lessing&...
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In the following review, O'Faolain assesses the themes, motifs, and characterization in Love, Again.
Doris Lessing's fictional range defies comparison—unless with a literary team ...
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In the following essay, Sceats examines the representation of eating and food in Lessing's writing, particularly in terms of their role in interpersonal or social relationships.
[…] ther...
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In the following review, Simon contrasts the protagonist and themes of Ben, in the World with those of The Fifth Child.
“It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history ...
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In the following excerpt, Davis admires the Realist tendencies of Ben, in the World, particularly in the descriptions of the material world.
Shed Ten Years in Ten Weeks. Garv Null's Ultimate An...
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In the following review, Hensher compares The Sweetest Dream to the style and narration of Lessing's previous works.
Every great novelist makes a characteristic noise: every great novelist is, ...
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In the following review, Merritt assesses The Sweetest Dream within the context of Lessing's later career.
By prefacing this vast novel [The Sweetest Dream] with an authorial disclaimer, Doris ...
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In the following review, Zaleski observes parallels between Lessing's life experience and the narrative of The Sweetest Dream.
In lieu of writing volume three of her autobiography (“beca...
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In the following review, Brandon focuses on the theatrical setting, style, and implications of the central theme of Love, Again.
When [Love, Again] starts, this is still just a concept; by the end, th...
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In the following review, Bick assesses the sexual dimension of Love, Again.
Lessing's latest novel [Love, Again] deserves applause for its frank depiction of its older, female protagonist...
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In the following review, Newson describes the plot and narrative elements of Love, Again.
Doris Lessing's most recent novel, Love, Again, explores familial relationships, romantic love, loss, l...
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In the following review, Grossman examines the narrative structure of Love, Again.
Doris Lessing has pursued her fictional explorations of sexual passion for a remarkable forty years and more, beginni...
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In the following review, Hobbs evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Love, Again.
Doris Lessing, the noted British fiction writer best known for The Golden Notebook, has turned her attention to th...
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In the following review, Bell discerns a thematic departure in Love, Again from Lessing's typical treatment of love.
The title of Doris Lessing's latest novel [Love, Again] refers, most ...
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In the following review, Sampson highlights the passion of Lessing's memories in Walking in the Shade.
Of all the free spirits of London in the late 1950s, Doris Lessing appeared the most free....
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In the following essay, Halisky finds parallels between the female protagonists in Gail Godwin's “A Sorrowful Woman” and Lessing's “To Room Nineteen.”
The her...
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In the following essay, Nordius regards T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as an important subtext in “To Room Nineteen.”
In her illuminating discussion of Doris Lessing's debt t...
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In the following essay, Tiger considers the relationship between Lessing's short fiction and her longer works through a reading of two of her short stories: “To Room Nineteen” and...
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In the following essay, Pickering explores the related themes of the stories in African Stories and her novel The Grass Is Singing.
The Grass Is Singing was written before Lessing left Rhodesia and pu...
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In the following essay, Harvey disavows the influence of Lessing's “One off the Short List” on Leo Bellingham's “In for the Kill.”
The practice of comparing w...
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In the following essay, Tyler examines the troubled mother-daughter relationship in “Among the Roses.”
Doris Lessing has long demonstrated in her work a love-hate relationship with women...
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In the following essay, Tyler asserts that Virginia Woolf and Lessing use the Demeter myth “in their fiction to subvert the traditional heterosexual romance plot.”
In her now classic wor...
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In the following essay, Gohrbandt compares the use of fable elements in the African stories of Lessing and Bessie Head.
1 the Problem of Comparability
The art of narrative in Africa is fed from so man...
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In the following essay, Hotchkiss provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Lessing's African stories.
When Doris Lessing's collection of African stories first appeared in 1951, whit...
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Critical Essay by Robert S. Ryf
[Briefing For a Descent Into Hell] seems to me to be an important synthesis of central aspects of The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City and in some ways to consti...
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Critical Essay by Celia Betsky
[The Memoirs of a Survivor] is about the future, where now the "ordinariness of the extraordinary" has taken hold. Yet in the chaos of this imagined future...
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Critical Essay by Rene Kuhn Bryant
Complex character creation, spell-binding plot-spinning, delicate character interplay, bright dialogue—none of these has been regarded as Mrs. Lessing'...
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Critical Essay by Roberta Rubenstein
[Stories] offers Lessing's most characteristic voices, moods, preoccupations. Stories such as "The Habit of Loving," "The Other Woman,&...
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Critical Essay by Diane Johnson
It is not Mrs. Lessing's fault that, among the many secrets she knows, her knowledge of women's anger and aggression, even more than of their sexuality, t...
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Critical Essay by Ruth Perry
[Lessing] reads like a nineteenth-century novelist with a twentieth-century sensibility, exercising a generously detailed, old-fashioned realism to delineate modern types ...
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Critical Essay by Gore Vidal
Although Doris Lessing has more in common with George Eliot than she has with any contemporary serious-novelist, she is not always above solemnity, as opposed to mere seri...
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Critical Essay by Pamela Hansford Johnson
I was worried about Doris Lessing's Martha Quest series, partly because the heroine was treated with so conscientious a harshness, so honorable a lack ...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Lively
There has always been an element of didacticism, of using the novel as a vehicle for instruction, in [Doris Lessing's] work; and those who admire the elegance ...
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Critical Essay by Keith Waterhouse
In Pursuit of the English is a completely misleading title, suggesting as it does an updated England, Their England (a job that, incidentally, badly needs doing.) Mr...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
The nineteen pieces which go to make up A Man and Two Women are the work of an original and scrupulous artist. Mrs. Lessing's writing is all her ...
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Critical Essay by James Gindin
In the best stories in her new collection, A Man and Two Women, Miss Lessing has developed her feminism and her concern for contemporary issues into a … subtle an...
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Critical Essay by Edward Hickman Brown
Spanning [Doris Lessing's] entire career, [African Stories] includes every story she has written about Africa, from her earliest collection to the most re...
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Critical Essay by J. M. Edelstein
On the basis of this book alone, Doris Lessing must be counted as one of the most important fiction writers of our times. African Stories includes every story Miss Le...
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Critical Essay by Mary Ann Singleton
[Doris Lessing] believes (with many others) that our civilization is slipping ever-faster toward the precipice. Almost from the beginning, her work has explored wh...
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Critical Essay by Lorelei Cederstrom
The Summer Before the Dark is Doris Lessing's most misunderstood novel. If taken at face value, the novel lacks depth and substance. This has led some criti...
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Critical Essay by Carol P. Christ
Doris Lessing's immense and unwieldy five-volume series, The Children of Violence, chart a spiritual journey from a woman's perspective. Though Lessing&...
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In the following essay, Fishburn contends that Lessing's novels are highly complex, subtly self-conscious "metafictions" and that "Lessing has never truly been the realist ...
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Moorehead is an English journalist and nonfiction writer. In the following review, she praises Under My Skin for its vivid and evocative depiction of Rhodesia and for the insights the book offers into...
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Coetzee is a South African novelist, critic, essayist, and translator. In the review below, he offers a summary of Lessing's life and career, remarking on Lessing's thoughts concerning f...
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Pritchard is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he remarks on the theme and style of Under My Skin and summarizes Lessing's development throughout her literary career.
A ...
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In the following essay, Franko examines "Lessing's ambivalent attitude toward canonical authorities" by focusing on the ways in which the narrators of her novels and short stories...
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Tiger is a Canadian critic and educator. In the following essay, she focuses on Lessing's short stories "To Room Nineteen" and "A Room" in her discussion of the auth...
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In the following positive review of The Real Thing, Bemrose singles out "The Pit" as "the collection's finest story."
In 1777, the English writer and wit Samuel John...
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Appiah is an English-born American critic and educator who has written extensively on philosophy, literature, and African culture. In the following largely positive review of African Laughter, he disc...
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Ritvo is an American critic and educator whose works include The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). In the following excerpt from a review in which she also di...
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In the following essay, Tyler examines Lessing's short story "Among the Roses" from a feminist perspective, elucidating its mother-daughter theme in relation to the ancient Greek ...
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An American critic, Eder has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In the following review, he laments that "Lessing proclaims but does not convey the...
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An English novelist and historian, Davidson is a prominent scholar in the field of African history. In the following review, he remarks favorably on Under My Skin.
Does anyone remember Southern Rhodes...
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In the following review, Kakutani praises Lessing's evocation of Africa and colonial life but laments that the author's self-portrait is "an incomplete one, filled with rationaliz...
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Childhood
Doris May Tayler was born in Persia which is now Iran on October 22, 1919. Her parents were both British. Her father was a clerk at the Imperial Bank of Persia while her mother worked as ...
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Lessing, Doris
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris (May) Lessing
