DORIS LESSING A biography - Hardcover

Klein Carole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715629514 ISBN 13: 9780715629512

Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 2000

Synopsis

Both in her personal life and in her literature, Doris Lessing broke the rules. Born in Persia and raised in Rhodesia by a hypercritical mother and a father who was shell-shocked during the First World War, she was forever in search of her essential identity. Twice married and divorced before the age of thirty, she moved to Britain with one of her children and little more than an unpublished manuscript in her suitcase. Ardently embracing communism, then feminism, she would discard them both long before their attractions faded for others. As a writer, she consistently charted new territory, most famously with the series of science fiction novels she submitted under a pseudonym. Based on numerous interviews and sources, this is a fascinating portrait of a celebrated literary rebel who continually reinvented herself and the world in her prodigious work.

About this title

About the Author:

Carole Klein (1933-2001) taught English, creative writing, and women's studies at Goddard College, the State University of New York, and New York University. She was also on the writing faculty of the New School and lectured widely on writing, women writers, women's issues, and cultural history. Among her best-known works are Aline and Gramercy Park.

From Publishers Weekly:

When the prolific, multifaceted novelist Lessing (Ben; In the World; etc.) heard that several biographies of her were in the works, she wroteA"in self-defense"Atwo well-received books covering her first four decades before this first, disappointing biography could be published. In her own books, Lessing captured the more colorful and exuberant parts of her life: her childhood in Southern Rhodesia, her rebellious adolescence, her two unsuccessful marriages, her anticolonial political radicalism, her affiliation with the Communist Party and her literary debut in London's bohemian, intellectual circles. Klein (Aline; Gramercy Park), after a pallid paraphrased account of Lessing's version, is left to assemble other, less satisfactory sources on the remaining years, which cover Lessing's writings after The Golden Notebook, her experiments with radical psychology and her conversion to Sufism. Klein's interviews with Lessing's ex-friends and former colleagues are largely anonymousAand often filled with memories of her aloofness, irritability or vulnerability. Some are willing to go on record, such as Clancy Sigal, who was, at least in his own opinion, the great love of her life; Klein similarly takes full advantage of Lessing's correspondence with editor Robert Gottlieb. Otherwise, she depends on material from Lessing's previously published interviews and her often autobiographical fiction and nonfiction. Klein's psychological analysis of her subject lags after Lessing's own, without the irony and wit, and her striving for an objective viewpoint results, often, in merely noting Lessing's inconsistencies. Lessing entitled the first volume of her autobiography Under My SkinAwhich is where, for all Klein's research despite Lessing's disapproval, this biography never gets. B&w illus.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0715629514
• ISBN 13: 9780715629512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1