From Salon.com on Doris Lessing's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/10/12/doris_lessing_guide/index_np.htmlFor over half a century, Doris Lessing has turned her prolific pen to just about every prose form -- fiction, autobiography, essays, drama. Yet all of her writing stems from the impulse to lay bare the grid of class, race, and gender relations that governs her middle-class characters' lives. Lessing brings the microscopic intensity of George Eliot and the combative sexual consciousness of D.H. Lawrence to bear on English culture, whether the context is the provincially hierarchical "settler" society of Southern Rhodesia in "A Proper Marriage" or the beleaguered bohemia of "free women" in "The Golden Notebook." Lessing's reputation as one of the most important novelists of the post-World War II period rests firmly on her contribution to the grand tradition of English social realism. Yet Lessing herself once dismissed George Eliot, to whom she is so often compared, as "good as far as she goes"; she prefers to claim the more cosmopolitan influence of Tolstoy and Balzac.
Indeed, this apparently most British of writers was thirty years old before she set foot in England or published her first novel. Her upbringing on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) acquainted her more thoroughly with the isolation and racial exploitation of white colonial culture than with an imperial literary heritage. Her formal schooling ended at age fourteen, and in "Under My Skin," the first volume of her autobiography, Lessing notes with pride the real accomplishments of her youth: the ability to "set a hen, look after chickens and rabbits, worm dogs and cats, pan for gold, take samples from reefs, cook, sew, use the milk separator and churn butter, go down a mine shaft in a bucket, make cream cheese and ginger beer … drive the car, shoot pigeons and guineafowl for the pot,
preserve eggs." By the time she left for London in 1949, she had augmented these accomplishments with two divorces, three children, the obloquy of Communist party membership and anti-apartheid agitation, and the unpublished draft of her first novel.
>>snip
Lessing's scary genius lies in her ability to bring her readers face-to-face with an unadorned reflection of some of our more depressing, but all too human, features. At the same time, her realism has always coexisted with a tendency toward mysticism. Her novels of the 1970s compellingly combine a surface of social and geographic detail with journeys into an inner space that Lessing described, in "The Real Thing," as "so much more intelligent than the slow, lumbering, daylike self." In the haunting "Memoirs of a Survivor," for example, worlds separated by time and space interpenetrate through the vision of the unnamed female narrator, enabling her to save herself and her companions from extinction. But when Lessing leaves humanity entirely behind, as she does in the science fiction sequence Canopus in Argus: Archives (1979-1983), her depictions of warring galactic empires lack the individuality and emotional insight she brings to earthly society. In the novel "Mara and Dann," she returns once again to the theme of earthly apocalypse, with human, if visionary, protagonists. The theme of earthly apocalypse has ever been with us, and is embraced by the sincerely intelligent, and the fanatically religious, alike. Doris Lessing shines a light on that theme, and many others, in her volume of work.
Congratulations, Doris Lessing!
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