The
novelist Doris Lessing, who tackled race, ideology, gender politics and the
workings of the psyche in a prolific and often iconoclastic career, died in
London on Sunday at the age of 94, her publisher HarperCollins said.
The
British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie hailed the "warmth, sharp mind and
ferocity" of a writer who continually reinvented herself to challenge
conventions, but defied the feminists and leftists who would have claimed her
for their cause.
Lessing
won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, only the 11th woman to do so, but
characteristically refused to offer the expected gushing response on hearing
the news, observing drily: "One can get more excited than one gets, you
know."
Born in
what was then Persia, now Iran, on October 22, 1919, Lessing was raised in
Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
When she
moved to Britain at 30, escaping the scene of an unhappy childhood and two
failed marriages, she had in her suitcase the manuscript of a novel that broke
new ground with its depiction of an inter-racial relationship in her
white-ruled homeland. "The Grass Is Singing" was an immediate
bestseller in Britain, Europe and America.
Her early
stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the 1950s and early 1960s,
decried the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials and exposed the
sterility of white culture in southern Africa - work that made her a
"prohibited alien" in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.
Lessing
wrote that, for her, Africa was "not a place to visit unless one chooses
to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just
over the border of memory or of thought".
But it
was her 1962 novel "The Golden Notebook" that brought her
international fame with its experimental style and format, and linked her
firmly to the feminist cause.
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