by Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Persia to British parents. In 1925, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in Africa, where her parents became unsuccessful farmers. Twenty-four years later, after two unhappy marriages and the philosophical and personal turmoil of being involved in Marxist politics, Lessing left Africa for London, where she quickly established herself as a promising novelist, becoming known among other works for her series Children of Violence, about Martha Quest, a character who grows up in Africa and settles in England. Lessing returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1956 to find herself a “prohibited immigrant” because of her politics; she was at this point officially exiled from the country, a ban that was not lifted until 1982. Finally the Marxist government of Robert Mugabe allowed her to return to a transformed land...