LESSING, DORIS (MAY)

born Oct. 22, 1919, Kermanshah, Iran British writer whose novels and short stories are largely concerned with people involved in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. Her father was serving in Iran as a captain in the British army at her birth. The family moved to a farm in Rhodesia, where she lived from 1924 until she settled in England in 1949. In her early adult years she was an active communist. In Pursuit of the English (1960) tells of her initial months in England, and Going Home (1957) describes her reaction to Rhodesia on a return visit. Her first published book, The Grass Is Singing (1950), is about a white farmer and his wife and their African servant in Rhodesia. Her most substantial work is her series of novels about Martha Quest, who also grows up in southern Africa and settles in England. They were published in two volumes as Children of Violence (196465). The Golden Notebook (1962), in which a woman writer attempts to come to terms with the life of her times through her art, is one of the most complex and the most widely read of her novels. The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) is a prophetic fantasy. A master of the short story, Lessing has published several collections, including The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972); her African stories, collected in This Was the Old Chief's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet (both 1973); and Stories (1978). Lessing turned to science fiction in a five-novel sequence titled Canopus in Argos: Archives (197983). The novels The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could . . . (1984) were published pseudonymously, under the name Jane Somers, to dramatize the problems of unknown writers. In 1985 Lessing published The Good Terrorist, a novel about a group of revolutionaries in London. The Fifth Child, a horror story about a family destroyed by the birth of a monstrous child, was published in 1988.