A searching first biography of the celebrated literary rebel who continually reinvented herself and the world in her prodigious work, this book is based on exclusive interviews with the fascinating Doris Lessing's lovers, colleagues, and friends. This first biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers uncovers the woman that Lessing herself withheld in her autobiographical novels and memoirs. For beyond the courageous, resourceful figure who fearlessly challenges the status quo in works like the four-volume Children of Violence or Lessing's masterpiece Golden Notebook, this revealing study finds an emotionally fragile woman forever in search of her essential identity. Displaced and rebellious, Lessing also always broke the rules. Born in Persia to a hypercritical mother, and a father who had been shell-shocked in World War I, she was raised in Rhodesia. Twice married and divorced by the age of thirty, she moved to Britain with an unpublished manuscript in her suitcase and only one of her children in hand. An ardent Communist before and during World War II - when she was married to a German - she distanced herself from the Party shortly thereafter. Similarly, she ardently embraced and then discarded feminism. A prolific writer, she continued throughout her career to chart new territory, most famously with the series of science-fiction novels she submitted to her publisher under a pseudonym, and to reinvent the formidable persona masking the far more frangible self that this book reveals.

A searching first biography of the celebrated literary rebel who continually reinvented herself and the world in her prodigious work, this book is based on exclusive interviews with the fascinating Doris Lessing's lovers, colleagues, and friends. This first biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers uncovers the woman that Lessing herself withheld in her autobiographical novels and memoirs. For beyond the courageous, resourceful figure who fearlessly challenges the status quo in works like the four-volume Children of Violence or Lessing's masterpiece Golden Notebook, this revealing study finds an emotionally fragile woman forever in search of her essential identity. Displaced and rebellious, Lessing also always broke the rules. Born in Persia to a hypercritical mother, and a father who had been shell-shocked in World War I, she was raised in Rhodesia. Twice married and divorced by the age of thirty, she moved to Britain with an unpublished manuscript in her suitcase and only one of her children in hand. An ardent Communist before and during World War II - when she was married to a German - she distanced herself from the Party shortly thereafter. Similarly, she ardently embraced and then discarded feminism. A prolific writer, she continued throughout her career to chart new territory, most famously with the series of science-fiction novels she submitted to her publisher under a pseudonym, and to reinvent the formidable persona masking the far more frangible self that this book reveals.