Doris Lessing was born to British parents on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Iran. When Lessing was five years old, her family moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). During her solitary childhood Lessing walked for hours on end through the African bush, a setting that would later play a prominent role in her novel The Golden Notebook. She married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, at the age of nineteen. After bearing two children she became increasingly involved in radical politics, leaving her family behind to join the Communist Party and, after getting divorced, to marry one of its members, Gottfried Lessing. She later divorced him as well. In 1949 Lessing left Africa with her third child, Peter, and settled in London, where she supported herself and her son through the proceeds from her writing. One of her most popular novels, The Golden Notebook draws on her experiences in Africa, her participation in politics, and her observations about the "sex war."
Postwar British colonialism. Following World War II, Great Britain gradually relinquished its role as an empire builder, granting self-government to India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon in the late 1940s.
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