1. Doris Lessing (Doris May Tayler) 1919-2013

2. • born in 1919 in Persia, father lost his leg in WWI, mother was a nurse
• moved to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1925
• educated at a Catholic convent until the age of 13, after that was self- educated
• left home at the age of 15 to work as a nursemaid
• married at the age of 19, had two children, divorced four years later
• influenced by the Left Book Club (revived in 2015)
• remarried Gottfried Lessing, a German Jew who had fled Nazi Germany (later became East German foreign minister), one son, divorced in 1949
• moved to London with son Peter
• actively campaigned against nuclear arms and apartheid, leading to her being banned from South Africa and Rhodesia for many years
• her first novel, The Grass is Singing was published in 1950

3. • in the 1950’s she took in a troubled teenage girl who later became a noted journalist (Jenny Diski, Emily in Memoirs of a Survivor)
• following the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary she left the British Communist Party (remained under surveillance of British Intelligence for a few more years—file made public in 2015)
• the work that earned her an international reputation The Golden Notebook, was published in 1962
• expressed vocal opposition to the Soviet actions in Afghanistan in the 1980’s
• wrote some works under the pseudonym Jane Somers to prove how hard it is to get published as a novice author
• later science fiction works influenced by Sufism
• wins Nobel Prize in 2007 at the age of 88, oldest person to ever receive literature prize
• died in 2013 at the age of 94

4. „What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.”
— Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July 1982

5. „Her combination of psychological introspection, political analysis, social documentary, and feminism gives a characteristic tone to her novels and short stories.” –Norton Anthology

6. To Room Nineteen (1963)
Main characters
Susan Rawlings
Matthew Rawlings
Four children
Mrs. Parkes

7. „This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in intelligence…they used their intelligence to preserve what they had created from a painful and explosive world.”

8. „…this was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other. In fact, even to say so, to think in such a way, was banal, they were ashamed to do it.”

9. „And there was the word faithful—stupid, all these words, stupid, belonging to a savage old world.”

10. „The whole thing is absurd—for him to have come home and told me was absurd. For him not to have told me was absurd. For me to care, or for that matter not to care, is absurd…” „Above all, intelligence forbids tears.”

11. „Resentment. It was poisoning her
„Resentment. It was poisoning her. (She looked at this emotion and thought it was absurd. Yet she felt it.) She was a prisoner…she was filled with emotions that were utterly ridiculous, that she despised, yet that nevertheless she was feeling so strongly she could not shake them off.”

12. „She had to accept the fact that after all, she was an irrational person and to live with it. Some people had to live with crippled arms, or stammers, or being deaf. She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own.”

13. „He had, she knew, diagnosed her finally as unreasonable
„He had, she knew, diagnosed her finally as unreasonable. She had become someone outside himself that he had to manage.”

14. „Of course, she said to herself, of course he would be bound to say that. If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let’s make a foursome!” „I mean, it’s ridiculous…all the lies everyone has to tell.” „Inside she was dissolving in horror at them both, at how far they had both sunk from honesty of emotion.”