Feigel (The Love-Charm of Bombs), a senior lecturer in English at King’s College London, weaves together two narratives: the life of acclaimed novelist Doris Lessing (1919–2013) and her own life story ...

Eventually there were more than 50 titles to her name in every conceivable genre, from The Grass is Singing to science fiction. She was not a fussy stylist. In the clear-eyed, broad-ranging empathy of ...

FREE WOMAN: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing, by Lara Feigel. Bloomsbury, 323 pp., $28. In “Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing,” Lara Feigel turns to the English novelist Doris Lessing ...

I always called her Doris, and so did almost everyone else who knew her and who read her books. I always found her approachable and never standoffish, though she once scolded me for giving an ...

And then there are Lessing’s memoirs, which took the reader up to 1962, just short of the publication of The Golden Notebook. Eventually there were more than 50 titles to her name in every conceivable ...

In 1920s Rhodesia, leopards and snakes roamed the bush. Yet for 6-year-old Doris Lessing, this inhospitable environment offered a welcome refuge from her parents: Alfred, a soldier whose leg had been ...

"The Cleft" by Doris Lessing; HarperCollins ($25.95): In her new novel, "The Cleft," Doris Lessing carves out a world as "other" as her own life. One of the most distinguished writers of the last 100 ...

Over a long life–she was 94 when she died on Nov. 17–Lessing produced dozens of novels, stories and essays–and one explosive device. It was her great and intricate second novel, The Golden Notebook, ...

When Doris Lessing, the British-Zimbabwean novelist who died in 2013, sat down to write “The Golden Notebook” in the 1950s, she was responding to a feeling of defeat in leftist circles, one similar to ...