Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean writer whose novels, short stories, and essays explored politics, social change, and personal identity.
The Golden Notebook: A 1962 novel by Doris Lessing, structured around notebooks that divide a writer's political, personal, and creative life. Its fractured form and female protagonist made it Lessing's most influential novel.
Southern Rhodesia: The British self-governing colony in southern Africa known as Southern Rhodesia from 1923 to 1964. Lessing grew up there, and its racial order became central to her early fiction.
Nobel Prize in Literature: An annual international literary award established by the will of Alfred Nobel. Lessing received the prize in 2007, recognized for a body of work spanning six decades.
Second-wave feminism: A feminist movement, prominent from the 1960s through the 1980s, focused on legal, social, and cultural inequalities. Lessing's response to feminist readings of The Golden Notebook was more complicated than straightforward identification.
The Grass Is Singing: Doris Lessing's 1950 novel about a white farmer's wife and her relationship with an African servant in colonial Southern Rhodesia. Her debut novel confronts racial hierarchy and colonial violence in the setting of her youth.
Persian Campaign: The Allied military campaign in Iran during the First World War, including fighting around Kermanshah. Lessing was born in Iran in 1919 while her British parents lived there after the war.
Virginia Woolf: An English modernist writer whose novels include Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Lessing's experiments with fragmented form invite comparison with Woolf's modernist fiction.
Socialist realism: A state-backed artistic doctrine that presents socialist society and working-class life in ideologically approved forms. Lessing's break with Communist orthodoxy led her beyond its prescribed literary model.
Children of Violence: A five-novel sequence by Doris Lessing following Martha Quest from colonial Southern Rhodesia into adulthood and political disillusionment. The sequence gives extended form to Lessing's account of a woman shaped by colonial society.
Communist Party of Great Britain: A British political party founded in 1920 that followed Marxism-Leninism. Lessing joined the party in 1952 and later fictionalized the experience of political commitment.