Doris Lessing: A Biography - Hardcover

Klein, Carole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715629514 ISBN 13: 9780715629512

Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

Throughout her life, Doris Lessing broke the rules in both her her personal life and within the accepted mores of literature. A trailblaser of the women's movement and an early experimenter with drugs, she gained notoriety in the sixties with her first novel "The Grass is Singing", and subsequently with her explosive "Golden Notebook" and the "Children of Violence" series. At the age of eighty she remains part of the avant garde. Doris Lessing has always resisted appointing an official biographer. In this unofficial biography, Carole Klein, separates fact from the fiction with which Dories Lessing has surrounded herself. Using the private correspondence between Lessing, her long-standing editor Tobert Gottlieb and her agent John Cushman, she reveals a complex woman who is both self-assured and remarkably fragile. Beginning with Lessing's birth in Persia to a cold and spiteful mother, Corale Klein follows Lessing through her many reincarnations: an isolated childhood in Africa, lonely years at a distant boarding school, a rebellious and promiscuous young adulthood, years at a menial job as a telephone operator, a brief marriage, motherhood, her flight from her husband and children, her political activism, fame and, always, her writing. Carole Klein attempts to reveal the spirit of a woman who was never afraid to challenge the status quo, who always sought a deeper truth, ending up losing the battle with her own identity.

About this title

Review

"Writers may protest as much as they like: but our lives do not belong to us": Doris Lessing's statement of her antagonism towards biography at the beginning of Under My Skin--the first volume of her autobiography published in 1994--does not bode well for the biographers who, she tells us, are waiting in the wings to struggle with the difficulty of telling the "truth" about her life. No surprise, then, that Lessing refused to co-operate with Carole Klein's Doris Lessing, the first biography devoted to this influential, often unsettling, writer who has done so much to bring women's fiction into contact with some of the most urgent political and aesthetic topics in contemporary culture. Klein's biographical method is conventional: she begins at the beginning with Lessing's parentage, her early childhood in Persia and Rhodesia, her schooling and early marriages, before moving on to document what she can of Lessing's personal, political and cultural activities in post-war London (Lessing's reputation as an anti-colonial colonial, for example, as well her life as a single mother, a "free woman" in the language of her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962)). In this sense, Doris Lessing is a useful resume of a complex life and context; in particular, moving between Lessing's autobiographies and her fiction, Klein gives a painfully convincing account of the effects on Lessing of her early relation with her mother. At the same time, both life and context exert enormous pressure on Klein's interpretative framework. Throughout her interviews with the writer's friends and colleagues, as well as her readings of the memoirs and fiction, Klein finds Lessing disturbingly detached, even impenetrable. "There is a shadow on the pages, someone behind them", she writes in the epilogue, casting Lessing as a writer desperately trying to "compensate herself for the past's terrible pain". This is convincing as far it goes, but ultimately Doris Lessing falls short of its subject: the compelling opacity which, it seems, binds Lessing's life to her writing. --Vicky Lebeau

From the Publisher

Praise for Doris Lessing: A Biography by Carole Klein
‘Doris Lessing is well-served to have her life recorded and interpreted by one of our finest contemporary biographers. I cannot stop marvelling at Carole Klein’s skill in turning the complex convoluted and complicated facts of Lessing’s life into such an insightful and objective story. This account is destined to be the definitive work for many years to come, and anyone who has ever admired Doris Lessing’s writing will have to read it.’

Deirdre Blair, author of Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir

‘With Carole Klein, Doris Lessing is in the sensitive hands of an author who knows exactly how to illuminate the lights and shadows of the world inhabited by this brilliant, strange, fearless novelist. The language is marvelously clear, the details vividly described, and of course Lessing's life is, as one would expect, enthralling.’

Marion Meade, author of The Unruly Life of Woody Allen and Dorothy Parker

‘This new biography gives a fascinating account of what is most fascinating about Doris Lessing - the interface between her private self and her books. A critic once suggested that she took ‘the personal’ to be ‘a form of selfishness, a capitalist hoarding of territory’. Sometimes advantageous in her life, and though she likes to write autobiographically, she can’t be objective about it. Carole Klein can, and is.’

Ronald Hayman, author of Jung and Thomas Mann

Edition details

• Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0715629514
• ISBN 13: 9780715629512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304