Lessing, Doris

Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2007, is an English female novelist of the post-World War II period; her prolific and varied literary career, however, extends into the first decade of the 21st century with the publication of such recent novels as The Cleft (2007) and Alfred and Emily (2008).

Doris Lessing's status as a feminist writer is as much unsolicited as inescapable. In spite of her attempt to drown her literary voice in the major political and communal issues of her age, thus instinctively shying away from a stereotyped feminine sensibility, many of her novels are today celebrated as feminist manifestos, deep psychic insights into the contemporary feminine self in both white colonial and metropolitan societies. Doris Lessing hence represents a controversial image of the contemporary female writer at war with her own “feminine” expression; her novels in addition show the development of the debate around women's oppression and liberation into unprecedented frankness about hitherto silenced psychosexual issues like matrimony, motherhood, and sexual liberation.

As a female writer, Lessing followed a quite neat line of development from autobiography to collective and communal experience. Her writings have always shown, however, a willful overshadowing of feminism by political and global concerns, thus seemingly asserting masculine values. Her own fiery character and eloquent anger against the patriarchal urge to mold her into a delicate, submissive femininity is expressed by her rejection of feminine models (represented by the much-despised mother figure) and her self-assertive choice of masculine modes of experience (especially her own experience as a left-wing activist and immigrant in bleak, postwar London). In art, as much as in life, Lessing's feminine rebellion is expressed by her flight into universal and as such, masculine, experience.