I discovered Doris Lessing in a small second hand bookshop in Oslo, Norway, looking for some Norwegian literature in English. The owner told me that someone had come the day before and bought almost everything he had, but I perused the shelves anyway, and came up with a volume of Lessing´s short stories called The Black Madonna.
The stories all take place in the African bush, and so I took to Google to read about Lessing, an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life.
Born in Iran to British parents, as a child she moved to Africa where her parents were promised a get-rich scheme that never came to fruition. Her stories detail her experiences exploring the property owned by her parents and the inherent racism she saw towards the natives.
As a child Lessing was only interested in escaping from the rigid rules imposed on her by her mother, who was trying to recreate the perfect British home in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Thus at the age of 15, she left home and took a job as a nursemaid. She began writing and sold some stories to South African magazines, and never looked back.
Her writing basically an expose on life for the natives in Africa and the racism and maltreatment they experienced from the whites, she was eventually banned from Southern Rhodesia and moved to England. Given that she was living in England in the 1930s, her views on women and marriage and their place in society is rather amazing. Says the biography of her on her website: “Lessing’s life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood.”
Growing up she saw her mother and viewed her as stifled, someone who gave up her interests and what made her her to be married and have children, and Lessing detested it. Although she did marry at age 19 and had two children, when she sensed that she was losing her own personhood, she left her marriage and her family, radical acts in the day and age in which she was living.
Called ‘unfeminine’ and many other things I’m sure, Lessing constantly lived her best life and challenged not only herself, but others around her to fight for a better world.
Lessing won numerous awards and prizes throughout her life, including the Prince of Asturias award from Spain and the Nobel in 2007. She was even awarded a damehood, which she systematically rejected, saying it from a nonexistent empire. She was fiercely feminist and fiercely brave, standing up for herself in a society that trampled on women’s wishes and desires and dreams. She lived her fullest life, always doing what she wanted and what was best for herself, and for this I admire her.