Increasingly a private person despite the publication of two volumes of autobiography, she has often been reluctant to divulge biographical information, preferring to have her work speak for itself.
Doris May (Tayler) Lessing was born 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia (now Bakhtaran, Iran), one of two children born to Alfred Cook Tayler, who had been a bank clerk in England before World War I, and Maude McVeagh Tayler, who nursed her husband following the amputation of a leg as a result of wounds suffered in the battle of Passchendaele. Tayler had worked for the Imperial Bank in Persia, but with a better education for the children in mind, the family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where Lessing's younger brother, Harry, lived until his death. The Taylers settled in an isolated area one hundred miles west of the Mozambique border, where Tayler was unsuccessful as a farmer; for some twenty years the family lived in poverty. As a child Doris was sent to the Dominican convent school in Salisbury (now Harare) and later to a government school for girls, also in Salisbury. At the age of twelve or thirteen she moved back home because of eye trouble and subsequently was self-educated.
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