“The people who read it were galvanized by it, and it made her a famous writer in America.” Gottlieb said by telephone from his home in New York. “But they were the right 6,000 copies,” Mr. Robert Gottlieb, then her editor at Simon & Schuster and later at Alfred A. When “The Golden Notebook” was first published in the United States, Ms. Lessing, who joined the Communist Party in Africa, repudiated Marxist theory during the Hungarian crisis of 1956, a view for which she was criticized by some British academics.īecause of her outspoken views, the governments of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa declared her a “prohibited alien” in 1956. She later married Gottfried Lessing, a central member of the Left Book Club, a left-wing organization, and they had a son. A few years later, feeling imprisoned, she abandoned her family. She left home when she was 15, and in 1937 she moved to Salisbury (now Harare) in Southern Rhodesia, where she took jobs as a telephone operator and nursemaid. Lessing had what she has called a painful childhood. Lured by the promise of farming riches, the family moved to what is now Zimbabwe, where Ms. Her father was a bank clerk, and her mother was trained as a nurse. Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in what is now Iran. Lessing later disavowed that she herself was a feminist, for which she received the ire of some British critics and academics. Lessing wrote, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.”Īlthough she has been held up as an early heroine of feminism, Ms. Lessing’s alter ego.īecause she frankly described anger and aggression in women, she was attacked as “unfeminine.” In response, Ms. “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, tracked the story of Anna Wulf, a woman who wanted to live freely and was, in some ways, Ms. Lessing wrote candidly about the inner lives of women and rejected the notion that they should abandon their lives to marriage and children. “My name has been on the short list for such a long time.” “I was a bit surprised because I had forgotten about it actually,” she said. Lessing learned of the news from a group of reporters camped on her doorstep as she returned from a visit to the hospital with her son.
She is the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, nonfiction and two volumes of autobiography. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through voracious reading. Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her time, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.Īnnouncing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.