Doris Lessing was born October 22, 1919, in the country of Persia, which is now Iran. Her parents were English, and while Lessing was still young, they moved to Rhodesia, a region of South Africa which was then ruled by the British and has since been divided into the countries of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Her parents' attempts at establishing a farm there were not successful and the family struggled with poverty for many years. Lessing was schooled in a Roman Catholic convent but quit at age 14 due to recurring eye problems. At the age of 20, Lessing married a civil servant, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children. In 1943 the couple divorced and two years later she married Gottfried Lessing, a German Marxist activist. Their son Peter was born in 1947.

Much of Lessing's early fiction takes place in Rhodesia, even though she did not begin writing until moving...