Adore by Doris Lessing

Author:Doris Lessing
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris’s mother adapted to the rough life of the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a “civilized” Edwardian life among “savages,” but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.

Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home and then installed Doris in a convent school, where the nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, where she briefly attended an all-girls high school before dropping out. She was thirteen, and it was the end of her formal education.

But like other women writers from southern Africa who did not graduate from high school, such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She once commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers: “Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn’t apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn’t thinking in terms of being a writer then—I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time.” The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing’s early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, and Kipling; later she discovered D. H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth; her mother told them to the children, and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris’s formative years were also spent absorbing her father’s bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of “poison.” “We are all of us made by war,” Lessing has written, “twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.”

In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, “in a fever of erotic longing.” Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies.

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