Doris Lessing: A Biography

by Carole Klein

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786708069
• ISBN13: 9780786708062
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Length: 283 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Klein on Lessing

Carole Klein, whose earlier biography of Aline Bernstein (ALINE) was published to acclaim, has once again written an important book. Well-schooled in the work of Lessing, Klein's latest volume is yet another example of her careful research and writing on what can only be a difficult subject. It is must reading for anyone interested in Doris Lessing, her work, and biography in general.

"Must" reading for all Doris Lessing fans!

Doris Lessing provides a fine biography of a great American writer, based on interviews with her associates and friends and following her life and times. Prior readers of Lessing's works will consider this required reading as it lends many insights into her literary influences and career.

Less-ing and More: A Wonderfully Balanced Biography

From the opening pages of this remarkable biography, the reader realizes he/she is in the hands of a master writer as well as an unusually able researcher and interviewer. In just a few pages at the start, Klein manages to vividly describe the backgrounds of Doris' mismatched parents, Alfred and Emily Tayler (Emily later exchanged her second name, Maude, for her first) and of the generation that preceded them as well. The concluding lines of this introductory chapter are surprising and perfect, as are the endings of almost all the short and immensely readable chapters. I won't spoil the story--and like all good biographies, it is a story--by revealing what those lines are. Suffice it to say that they set the tone for all that follows, starting with Lessing's generally unhappy childhood in the Rhodesia whose beauty cast a lifelong spell on the young girl, and continuing through the unbearable tensions between Doris and her mother, which Klein makes agonizingly understandable. Klein's insights into Lessing's complicated involvement with politics in general and apartheid and Communism in particular, her early marriages, the now-well known abandonment of her family (she took only one of her three children) in pursuit of her all-consuming muse, and the origins and themes of her ground-breaking books are keenly and wittily set out. Though feminists took what is arguably the best known of these, The Golden Notebook, as a Bible, Lessing, in typically contradictory mode, denied--and continues to deny--any such intent. It is in dealing with her prickly and elusive subject that Klein is at her best. She was able not only to unearth much new information, a great deal of it from previously untapped and (initally) unwilling sources--among them Clancy Sigal, who is generally assumed to be "Saul Green" in The Golden Notebook-- but to interpret and integrate her findings with skill, charm and sensitivity. Most remarkably, she resists the temptation to make Lessing a villainess, and shows real sympathy for her difficult and famously private subject, recognizing the fragility that underlies and perhaps caused her to develop into the woman and writer she became.

Seeing Doris Plain

Now in her eighties, Lessing continues to publish fiction and memoirs, still prolific if not as readable as she once was. But for the generation of women seeking idols in the 1960-70s, she was inspirational, her "Golden Notebook" required reading. We her curious admirers wanted to know what the woman really lived, from what magical spring gushed all those stories. This juicy, very readable biography, the first about Lessing, is unauthorized because the irascible Lessing is not one to bless a biographer. Nevertheless, Carole Klein renders her judgments crisply and fearlessly. She allows Lessing her virtues, despite the fact that she is no lovable old lady.