Doris Lessing was born in Persia of British parents in 1919. She spent her childhood on her father's farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia. After leaving school at 14, she worked in a variety of ...

Just shy of her 89th birthday, English writer Doris Lessing has attracted many labels in the past six decades: feminist, Communist, activist, social commentator and — as of last year — Nobel laureate.

After Doris Lessing’s death in 2013, Lara Feigel reread The Golden Notebook (1962). Her older friends had begun to reminisce about how it had changed their lives. When Feigel first read it as a ...