Biography
"Doris Lessing is the kind of writer who has followers, not just readers," Lesley Hazleton once obrved. But Lessing, who novel The Golden Notebook蒸青绿茶 was embraced as a feminist icon, has ldom told her followers exactly what they wanted to hear. For much of her career, she has frustrated readers' expectations and thwarted would-be experts on her work, penning everything from traditional narratives to postmodern novels to mystic fables.
Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) and grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father made an unsuccessful attempt to farm maize. Though she loved living on the farm, her family life was often ten and unhappy. Lessing married at the age of 20, but three years later, feeling stifled by colonial life and increasingly distresd by the racism of her society, she joined the Communist Party, "becau they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives."
烤燕麦饼Soon after that, she left her husband and first two children to marry fellow Communist Gottfried Lessing, with whom she had a son. They divorced, and she took her son with her t
o England, where she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, to high acclaim. After veral more novels, including the mi-autobiographical ries Children of Violence, Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook, a postmodern, fragmentary narrative about a writer's arch for identity. The Golden Notebook gained a passionate following in the feminist movement and "left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women," as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote.
To Lessing's dismay, she was frequently cited as a "feminist writer" after that. Yet as Diane Johnson pointed out in a 1978 review of Stories, Lessing "also understands men, politics, social class, striving, religion, loneliness and lust." Johnson added: "Mrs. Lessing is the great realist writer of our time, in the tradition of the major Continental novelists of the 19th century, particularly Stendhal and Balzac, but also Turgenev and Chekhov -- a masculine tradition with which she shares large moral concerns, an earnest and affirmative view of human nature, and a dead-eye for social types."
But Lessing, who once called realist fiction "the highest form of pro writing," soon launc
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hed into a science-fiction ries, Canopus in Argos: Archives, which baffled many of her fans. Lessing ud the term "space fiction" for the ries, which recounts human history from the points of view of various extraterrestrial beings. Though Lessing gained some new readers with her Canopus ries, her early admirers were relieved when she came back to Earth in The Fifth Child, the story of a monstrous child born to ordinary suburban parents, which Carolyn Kizer deemed "a minor classic." Later novels like Mara and Dann included elements of fantasy and science fiction, but recently, with the publication of The Sweetest Dream, Lessing has returned to domestic fiction in the realist mode, which many critics still e as her best form.
Throughout her life, Lessing has been drawn to systems for improving human experience -- first Marxism, then the psychiatry of R. D. Laing, then Sufi mysticism. But her yearning for a single, transcendent truth coexists with a sharp awareness of the contradictory mix of vanities, passions, and aggressions that make up most human lives. As Margaret Drabble noted, Lessing is "one of the very few novelists who have refud to believe that the world is too complicated to understand."
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
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Biography
Doris Lessing was born in Persia (prent-day Iran) to British parents in 1919. Her family moved to Southern Africa where she spent her childhood on her father's farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). When her cond marriage ended in 1949, she moved to London, where her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. The book explores the complacency and shallowness of white colonial society in Southern Africa and established Lessing as a talented young novelist.
She is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focud on a wide range of twentieth-century issues and concerns, from the politics of race that she confronted in her early novels t in Africa, to the politics of gender which lead to her adoption by the feminist movement, to the role of the family and the individual in society, explored in her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The books in the 'Children of Violence' ries (1952-69) are strongly influenced by Lessing's rejection of a domestic family role and her involvement with communism. The novels are autobiographical in many respects, telling the story of Martha Quest, a girl growing up in Africa who marries young despite her desperate desire to avoid the life her mother has led. The cond book in the ries, A Proper Marriage (1954), describes the unhappiness of the marriage and Martha's eventual rejection of it. The quel, 前理解A Ripple from the Storm (1958), is very much a novel of ideas, exploring Marxism and Martha's increasing political awareness. By the time that this book was written, however, Lessing had become disillusioned with communism and had left the party.
With the publication of her next novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing became firmly identified with the feminist movement. The novel concerns Anna Wulf, a writer caught in a personal and artistic crisis, who es her life compartmentalid into various roles - woman, lover, writer, political activist. Her diaries, written in different coloured notebooks, each correspond to a different part of herlf. Anna eventually suffers a menta
l breakdown and it is only through this disintegration that she is able to discover a new 'wholeness' which she writes about in the final notebook.
The pressures of social conformity on the individual and mental breakdown under this pressure was something that Lessing returned to in her next two novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Summer Before the Dark (1973). Briefing for a Descent into Hell is about a man who is found wandering the streets of London with no memory of a 'normal' life, while Kate, the central character of 北京小吃店The Summer Before the Dark搞笑动图gif, achieves a kind of enlightenment through what doctors would describe as a breakdown.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Doris Lessing turned almost exclusively to writing fantasy and science fiction in the 'Canopus in Argos' ries, developing ideas which she had touched on towards the end of 'Children of Violence' and in Briefing for a Descent into Hell. The first book in the ries, Re: Colonid Planet 5, Shikasta, was published in 1979. The fourth, The Making of the Reprentative for Planet 8, was adapted by Philip G
lass as an opera, with a libretto by the author.
She made a return to realist fiction with Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could ... (1984), nt to her publisher under the pudonym Jane Somers. They were turned down for publication veral times and when published had only small print runs and few reviews. When the truth was uncovered, the books were, of cour, reprinted to much greater acclaim.
Lessing's more recent novels have continued to confront taboos and challenge preconceptions, generating many different and conflicting critical opinions. In The Good Terrorist (1985), Lessing returned to the political arena, through the story of a group of political activists who t up a squat in London. The book was awarded the WH Smith Literary Award. The Fifth Child (1988) is also concerned with alienation and the dangers inherent in a clod social group. Harriet and David react to the hedonism and excess of the 1960s by tting themlves up in a large hou and embarking on an enthusiastic
programme of childbearing and domestic bliss. Their fifth child, however, emerges as a malevolent, troll-like and angry figure who quickly disrupts the family idyll.
The acclaimed first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), and was followed by a cond volume, Walking in the Shade: Volume II of My Autobiography 1949-1962 (1997).
Doris Lessing's recent fiction includes Ben, in the World (2000), a quel to the The Fifth Child, and, The Sweetest Dream (2001), which follows the fortunes of a family through the twentieth century, t in London during the 1960s and contemporary Africa. She was made a Companion of Honour by the British Government in 1999, and is President of Booktrust, the educational charity that promotes books and reading. In 2001 she received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.
Doris Lessing lives in London. Her recent books include: the grandmothers (2003), a coll
ection of four short novels centred on an unconventional extended family; and Time Bites (2004), a lection of essays bad on her life experiences. Her latest book is Alfred and Emily (2008), which explores the lives of both her parents.
In 2007, Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (2008) is the full text of the lecture she gave to the Swedish Academy when accepting the prize.
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