Doris Lessing: A Biography Book

"Writers may protest as much as they like: but our lives do not belong to us": Doris Lessing's statement of her antagonism towards biography at the beginning of Under My Skin--the first volume of her autobiography published in 1994--does not bode well for the biographers who, she tells us, are waiting in the wings to struggle with the difficulty of telling the "truth" about her life. No surprise, then, that Lessing refused to co-operate with Carole Klein's Doris Lessing, the first biography devoted to this influential, often unsettling, writer who has done so much to bring women's fiction into contact with some of the most urgent political and aesthetic topics in contemporary culture. Klein's biographical method is conventional: she begins at the beginning with Lessing's parentage, her early childhood in Persia and Rhodesia, her schooling and early marriages, before moving on to document what she can of Lessing's personal, political and cultural activities in post-war London (Lessing's reputation as an anti-colonial colonial, for example, as well her life as a single mother, a "free woman" in the language of her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962)). In this sense, Doris Lessing is a useful resume of a complex life and context; in particular, moving between Lessing's autobiographies and her fiction, Klein gives a painfully convincing account of the effects on Lessing of her early relation with her mother. At the same time, both life and context exert enormous pressure on Klein's interpretative framework. Throughout her interviews with the writer's friends and colleagues, as well as her readings of the memoirs and fiction, Klein finds Lessing disturbingly detached, even impenetrable. "There is a shadow on the pages, someone behind them", she writes in the epilogue, casting Lessing as a writer desperately trying to "compensate herself for the past's terrible pain". This is convincing as far it goes, but ultimately Doris Lessing falls short of its subject: the compelling opacity which, it seems, binds Lessing's life to her writing. --Vicky LebeauRead More