LONDON (Reuters) – Novelist Doris Lessing, who tackled race, ideology, gender politics and the workings of the psyche in a prolific and often iconoclastic career, has died at the age of 94, her publisher said yesterday.
Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, only the 11th woman to do so.
She died peacefully at her London home in the early hours of the morning, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement.
Born in what was then Persia, now Iran, on Oct. 22, 1919, Lessing was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
She moved to Britain at the age of 30 with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, about the relationship of a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. It was an immediate bestseller in Britain, Europe and America.
Her early stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the 1950s and early 1960s, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa – work that earned her “prohibited alien” status in white-ruled Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
Lessing wrote that, for her, Africa was “not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought”.
But it was her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook that propelled her onto the international stage with its unconventional style and format, and linked her firmly to the feminist cause.
Its female heroine, Anna Wulf, is a writer caught in a personal and artistic
crisis who sees her life compartmentalised into various roles.
The Swedish Academy said in its Nobel citation that it “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship”.
But Lessing’s output also ranged much more widely.
In some 55 novels and collections of short stories and essays, she focused on the role of the family and the individual in society and even ventured into science fiction.
The four novels of Canopus in Argos, published between 1979 and 1983, provide a “”space eye” view of human life by describing a colonised planet Earth used as a social laboratory by galactic empires.
In The Good Terrorist (1985), she returned to the political arena through the story of a group of political activists who set up a squat in London.
In 1987’s The Wind Blows Away Our Words, Lessing attacked what she saw as the West’s indifference to the war in Afghanistan. In it, she described a trip she made in 1986 to Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.
And a year later, The Fifth Child, the story of a mother’s rejection of her son, was concerned with alienation and the dangers inherent in a closed social group.