Lessing's Autobiography series
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Lessing's Autobiography series |
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| Author: | Doris May Lessing |
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| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
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Series Titles
Under My Skin: Volume 1 of My Autobiography, to 1949
“I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by…robust and efficient hands.”
The experiences absorbed through these “skins too few” are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing’s childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
Walking in the Shade: Volume 2 of My Autobiography, 1949-1962
Walking in the Shade covers the years 1949 -1962, from Lessing’s arrival in London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook.
This was the period of the Cold War, a poisonously political time, but Doris Lessing reminds us—in perhaps the book’s most striking achievement—of what has been forgotten: that it was a time also of idealism and hope, of a sense of personal responsibility for the world, and of generosity of the imagination. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the ‘50s—it is hard now to appreciate how much—and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind.
Walking in the Shade also evokes the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother in 1950s London: her early success as one of the new hopeful post-war writers whose novels and short stories received critical acclaim both in Britain and abroad; her work in the theater…
