28 Facts About Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925.

Doris Lessing's novels include The Grass Is Singing, the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives.

In 2001 Doris Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature.

Doris Lessing left school at age 13 and was self-educated from then on.

Doris Lessing left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid.

Doris Lessing started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology and began writing around this time.

In 1937 Doris Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, civil servant Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children, before the marriage ended in 1943.

Doris Lessing left the family home in 1943, leaving the two children with their father.

Doris Lessing had a love affair with RAF serviceman John Whitehorn, who was stationed in Southern Rhodesia, and wrote him ninety letters between 1943 and 1949.

Doris Lessing moved to London in 1949 with her younger son, Peter, to pursue her writing career and socialist beliefs, but left the two older children with their father Frank Wisdom.

On 21 August 2015, a five-volume secret file on Doris Lessing built up by the British intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, was made public and placed in The National Archives.

The file, which contains documents that are redacted in parts, shows Doris Lessing was under surveillance by British spies for around twenty years, from the early-1940s onwards.

Disaffected, and turning away from Marxist political philosophy, Doris Lessing became increasingly absorbed with mystical and spiritual matters, devoting herself especially to the Sufi tradition.

At the age of fifteen, Doris Lessing began to sell her stories to magazines.

In 1982 Doris Lessing wrote two novels under the literary pseudonym Jane Somers to show the difficulty new authors face in trying to get their work printed.

Doris Lessing declined a damehood in 1992 as an honour linked to a non-existent Empire; she had previously declined an OBE in 1977.

Doris Lessing was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2007 Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Doris Lessing was only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history.

Doris Lessing was still able to attend the theatre and opera.

Doris Lessing began to focus her mind on death, for example asking herself if she would have time to finish a new book.

Doris Lessing died on 17 November 2013, aged 94, at her home in London, predeceased by her two sons, but was survived by her daughter, Jean, who lives in South Africa.

Doris Lessing's interest had turned to Sufism after coming to the realisation that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her disillusioned.

Doris Lessing regretted that critics failed to appreciate the exceptional structure of the novel.

Doris Lessing explained in Walking in the Shade that she modelled Molly partly on her good friend Joan Rodker, the daughter of the modernist poet and publisher John Rodker.

Doris Lessing did not like being pigeon-holed as a feminist author.

The Doris Lessing Society is dedicated to supporting the scholarly study of Lessing's work.

The formal structure of the Society dates from January 1977, when the first issue of the Doris Lessing Newsletter was published.