Publisher's Synopsis
Throughout her life, Doris Lessing broke the rules in both her her personal life and within the accepted mores of literature. A trailblaser of the women's movement and an early experimenter with drugs, she gained notoriety in the sixties with her first novel "The Grass is Singing", and subsequently with her explosive "Golden Notebook" and the "Children of Violence" series. At the age of eighty she remains part of the avant garde.;Doris Lessing has always resisted appointing an official biographer. In this unofficial biography, Carole Klein, separates fact from the fiction with which Dories Lessing has surrounded herself. Using the private correspondence between Lessing, her long-standing editor Tobert Gottlieb and her agent John Cushman, she reveals a complex woman who is both self-assured and remarkably fragile.;Beginning with Lessing's birth in Persia to a cold and spiteful mother, Corale Klein follows Lessing through her many reincarnations: an isolated childhood in Africa, lonely years at a distant boarding school, a rebellious and promiscuous young adulthood, years at a menial job as a telephone operator, a brief marriage, motherhood, her flight from her husband and children, her political activism, fame and, always, her writing.;Carole Klein attempts to reveal the spirit of a woman who was never afraid to challenge the status quo, who always sought a deeper truth, ending up losing the battle with her own identity.
