Lessing grew up in Zimbabwe when it still was Rhodesia and ruled by the British. She was born in Persia, and I found this snippet in the bio of The Golden Notebook -- an amazing book -- somehow innocent and charming: "while experimenting with mescaline in the early 1960s, she found that her life in Persia influenced her greatly."
Innocent and charming are not words that usually come to mind when describing Lessing. Curmudgeonly is more like it. And self-confident, and righteous, and brutally honest, even about her own faults. But I suppose the most accurate description would be self -absorbed. She examines everything about her life and the life around her. Her characters frequently go mad for a time and (usually) come back out of it. The women are strong, the men are misguided and don't cook for themselves.
Much of Lessing's life I had already guessed by reading her Martha Quest series. She was British in a British colony in Africa, she married young to get away from her mother (though she had always been afraid of being trapped in a marriage like her), then found herself trapped in a marriage. She left her husband and two children, became a communist, and lived with a German exile during World War II, all before she was twenty-two years old. Eventually, when she was thirty, she moved to London with her third child, a son by the German exile (whom she married so he could get a visa, purportedly). She's lived there ever since.
Lessing also has written science fiction, which she calls space fiction. I haven't read that.
Some random tidbits: her parents had all their teeth removed when they moved to Rhodesia, fearing there would be no good dentists there. Lessing gave Margaret Drabble a flowering plant when Drabble came to interview her, which has not flowered since. And Lessing believes the younger generations are going mad due to too much drumming in modern music.
Lessing also has one of the famous, if clicheed, stories about publishing as an unknown writer: After she was famous, publishers and critics frequently requested another book like The Golden Notebook instead of the space fiction she was writing. At last she produced Diary of a Good Neighbour, which is a sort of lighter version of TGN, but in the same vein. She decided to use the nom de plume Jane Somers, to see what the reaction would be. Her agent sent it around to the main publishing houses in England but no one would take it. It was too depressing, they said. (And this is a lighter version of TGN!!) Lessing finally sent it to the publisher who had published her first novel (when she was unknown), and he accepted it, saying it reminded him of Doris Lessing.
First page of The Summer Before the Dark
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