To Room Nineteen: Doris Lessing [graphic graphicname="TIF00052169" orient="portrait" size="A"]

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran) to two transplanted British expatriates, Alfred Cook Taylor (a farmer) and Emily Maude McVeagh. In 1924 the family moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia, where they stayed for twenty years. Doris's education began at a convent school and later at a government school for girls. Her formal education ended when she was twelve. After two failed marriages, she kept her second husband's name and moved to London where she resided as of 2004.

Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, (1950) which focused on the horrors of apartheid and colonization, was well received. Fiona Barnes, in her article on Lessing for Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes, however, that Lessing worried about being labeled as too narrowly political, as she noted in her...