In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

[7] Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital in London where he was recovering from his amputation.

[10][11] In 1925 the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize and other crops on about 1,000 acres (400 ha) of bush that Alfred bought.

In 1937 Doris moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, civil servant Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John, 1940–1992, and Jean, born in 1941), before the marriage ended in 1943.

[1] After the divorce, Doris's interest was drawn to the community around the Left Book Club, an organisation she had joined the year before.

[15] Lessing moved to London in 1949 with her younger son, Peter, to pursue her writing career and socialist beliefs, but left the two older children with their father Frank Wisdom.

"[16] As well as campaigning against nuclear arms, she was an active opponent of apartheid, which led her to being banned from South Africa and Rhodesia in 1956 for many years.

[18] In the 1980s, when Lessing was vocal in her opposition to Soviet actions in Afghanistan,[19] she gave her views on feminism, communism and science fiction in an interview with The New York Times.

[21] Disaffected, and turning away from Marxist political philosophy, Lessing became increasingly absorbed with mystical and spiritual matters, devoting herself especially to the Sufi tradition.

[24] In 1982 Lessing wrote two novels under the literary pseudonym Jane Somers to show the difficulty new authors face in trying to get their work printed.

[17][37] She died on 17 November 2013, aged 94, at her home in West Hampstead, London, of kidney failure, sepsis and a chest infection,[39] predeceased by her two sons, but was survived by her daughter, Jean, who lives in South Africa.

John Leonard praised her 1980 novel The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five in The New York Times,[46] but in 1982 John Leonard wrote in reference to The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 that "[o]ne of the many sins for which the 20th century will be held accountable is that it has discouraged Mrs. Lessing... She now propagandises on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic razzmatazz",[47] to which Lessing replied: "What they didn't realise was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

[49] The Canopus in Argos novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution of other worlds, including Earth.

Using Sufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher" Idries Shah,[42] the series of novels also uses an approach similar to that employed by the early 20th-century mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in his work All and Everything.

Lessing's interest had turned to Sufism after coming to the realisation that Marxism ignored spiritual matters, leaving her disillusioned.

[50] Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars,[51] but notably not by the author herself, who later wrote that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one's self from illusions had been overlooked by critics.

The Society also organises panels at the Modern Languages Association (MLA) annual Conventions and has held two international conferences in New Orleans in 2004 and Leeds in 2007.

[53] Lessing's literary archive is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin.

[55] The University of East Anglia's British Archive for Contemporary Writing holds Doris Lessing's personal archive: a vast collection of professional and personal correspondence, including the Whitehorn letters, a collection of love letters from the 1940s, written when Lessing was still living in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia).