Lessing awarded Nobel Prize in Literature at 88

BRITAIN: Eileen Battersby , Literary Correspondent, profiles the life and works of Doris Lessing

BRITAIN: Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, profiles the life and works of Doris Lessing

Matriarch or prophet, or possibly both, and certainly an iconic figure, the veteran writer Doris Lessing, this year's Nobel Literature Laureate, 88 this month, has remained a defining presence not only of feminism but of personal conscience. Freedom of choice, the individual in society and above all, moral responsibility for one's actions are her themes.

Lessing has, in a career begun publicly in 1950 with the publication of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, personified the idea of the committed career writer. Faced with the dilemma of responsibility and survival, she chose survival and paid the price of public censure.

By leaving her first two children, she escaped a bad marriage, fulfilled her literary vocation and surrounded herself with an aura of wary admiration.

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In old age, she has won the ultimate accolade, literature's major prize for a life's achievement. She has published a vast body of work, and most of it is still in print. In a sense, she is an obvious choice for the award: she is political in the purest sense, was for a time a communist, and has always been a radical, opinionated commentator and polemicist.

Above all, she is an engaged witness. Never a literary stylist, she has pursued truth, not art, and if she has had an abiding thesis, it is the life of women. In order to explore this theme fully, she wrote from the viewpoint of one woman - her own experience.

There is also the fact that Lessing is a product of an extraordinary time, the end of the British empire in Africa. She also belongs to a generation brought up on the first World War, who was then formed by the second World War. She is also an outsider, always a useful thing for a writer.

Born Doris Tayler in Iran (then Persia) in 1919, the child of English parents, she moved with them to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, when she was five. She first arrived in England at the age of 30 with a baby and a manuscript. Is she an English writer, or is she an African one? The answer is simple: she is both and neither.

Reading made her a writer and she has spoken about spending the long days of an unhappy childhood in her bedroom at the family farm reading - her way of escaping her anger with herself and with her parents, particularly her tragic relationship with her mother.

If she is formidable, a more driven version of Iris Murdoch, Lessing, even at her most determined, is invincibly human.

Her fiction has been set in Africa and contemporary Britain. Her third territory is the "inner space" as explored in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1975).

She makes no attempt to dispute that her fiction is drawn from her life as much as from observation and the imagination. She is Martha Quest from the Children of Violence quintet and she is not. Equally, she is young novelist Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook (1962) and then again not.

Anyone attempting to ask her about her life has been quickly assured, "it's all in the books". If her fiction has been based on her life, she has also taken no chances and has written wonderful memoirs such as Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997).

With characteristic candour, she told me she decided to write her autobiography mainly because she'd heard "some biographies, five I think, are on the way".

Interviewing Lessing is best approached as if it were an exam, and the interviewer is the candidate. On becoming the candidate, I set about reading all the books, and hoped for the best. In person, Lessing, then 80, looked like a beautiful old Russian grandmother, a tiny figure with grey hair pulled back in a severe bun, a soft voice and a repertoire of impatient gestures. After a resigned shrug, she muttered a greeting and then left me alone.

On the middle of the table in the small unpretentious sitting room of her west London terraced home were several volumes by Joseph Roth, the great chronicler of the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was holding the books when she returned. Once she knew he was one of my heroes, we were off. Her great smile filled the room.

She talked lovingly about books and quickly became the best of company. Although her accent sounded a bit like Queen Elizabeth's crossed with a trace of something else, her enthusiasm was that of a girl sharing secrets.

She spoke about her mother with a genuine sorrow. Maude McVeagh had lost her own beautiful, none-too-reliable mother when she was three. As a young woman, she had lost her true love and then, during the first World War, she had nursed a wounded soldier who had lost a leg. That man was to be Lessing's father. Just as the loss of his leg ruined his life, the miserable relationship endured by her parents had a major impact on Lessing.

For Lessing, a life is defined at childhood. At eight, she had been sent to a convent, and remembered being frightened by the Catholic rituals. Poor health freed her, and long absences from school effectively saw her formal education end by 14.

One of the books she gave me was a copy of Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond - a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.

It had won an international science prize.

For Lessing, world peace, the environment, justice, human rights, sexual equality, the rights of the child and ideas are the things that really matter.

Unlike most writers, she is impressively self-critical, dismissing several books as "ones I wouldn't mind not to have written".

The Golden Notebook, The Martha Quest and Children of Violence are ones she will stand by.

Interestingly, one of her finest books, The Fifth Child (1988) is about a new baby that destroys a smugly comfortable household. A sequel suggested by her German publisher drew Lessing back to the story.

Ben in the World, published when she was 80, is another of her best works.

Both are shaped by Lessing's tenacious humanity, the defining quality which won her this honour.