The woman has trouble stepping out of the taxi. She is old, and the taxi sits higher off the ground than she might like. As she stoops to protect her head, the long red scarf that hangs from her neck ...

Ms. Lessing was an uninhibited and outspoken novelist who produced dozens of novels, short stories, essays and poems, embarking on dizzying and at times stultifying literary experiments. By Helen T.

From her obituaries, and the serious critical assessments of her work, I hardly recognize the Doris Lessing I knew. I don’t fault the obit writers (I used to be one) or critics and admirers for ...

British writer Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Literature Prize for five decades of epic novels that have covered feminism, politics and her youth in Africa. Lessing, who will be 88 next week, is only ...

In recent years the life of cultivated people has been marked by a fierce attachment to "personal values." I put the phrase in quote marks to point toward something more problematic than the usual web ...

For over half a century, Doris Lessing has turned her prolific pen to just about every prose form — fiction, autobiography, essays, drama. Yet all of her writing stems from the impulse to lay bare the ...

In the course of a long and eventful life, author Doris Lessing was many things. She was a mother — and a self-described "house mother" for a procession of starving artists, writers and political ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Doris Lessing’s rebellion against middle-class values began in her early youth. Born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in ...

In a short explanation included in her latest book, Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing notes that "even alert offspring or children may miss gold" when writing about their parents. But in Alfred And ...

It’s called “Alfred & Emily.” It’s about her parents. About their lives as they were — deeply scarred by World War I and played out as British colonials in outback Rhodesia. And about what their lives ...