So the stack of documents we have here today
is, well... It's a little intimidating, isn't
it? Honestly, yeah. I mean, you've got Nobel
Prize citations right next to it. Declassified
MI5 surveillance logs. Exactly. And then a pile
of science fiction novels and these incredibly
gritty realist memoirs. And if you just looked
at these sources separately, you would absolutely
assume we were profiling three or four completely
different people. No question. It's a disjointed
collection. It is. You have the... Colonial farmer
living in a mud hut. Then you have the communist
radical in post -war London. The psychological
realist dissecting mental breakdowns. And the
mystic space opera writer. But of course we were
talking about just one person. Doris Lessing.
A woman who, it seems, managed to irritate almost
every single demographic she ever belonged to.
That's one way of putting it. I mean, she angered
the colonialists in Rhodesia. She alienated the
communists in London. She really frustrated the
feminists who tried to claim her. And then, yeah,
she completely baffled the literary critics by
writing about aliens. It feels like a career
built on, I don't know. Bridge burning. Or maybe
bridge building. Just not the bridges people
expected her to build. She was always a moving
target. A moving target. I like that. And that's
really what we want to explore in this deep dive.
We're not just, you know, walking through a biography
from A to B. We are trying to map the evolution
of a mind that just refused to settle. And to
do that, you have to understand the world she
was born into, which is, it's just so vastly
different from the one she left. Completely.
Geopolitically unrecognizable. And when we said
different, we mean, I mean, she was born in 1919.
Right, 1919. So the world is still reeling from
the First World War. The immediate aftermath.
Exactly. And the location is so key to everything
that follows. She wasn't born in London or anywhere
in England. She was born in Kermanshah, Persia.
Modern day Iran. Modern day Iran. Her father,
Captain Alfred Taylor, he was there working as
a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia. But
his story isn't just about being a bank clerk,
is it? The source material paints a very specific
picture of Alfred Taylor. Oh, absolutely. He's
a World War I veteran, and he's carrying a significant
amount of trauma. He lost a leg in the war. And
that trauma, it's not just physical. No, it was
deeply psychological. And it defined the family
dynamic. He met Doris's mother, Emily Maud, in
the Royal Free Hospital in London. It's almost
that classic tragic wartime trope. You know,
the wounded soldier and the nurse who cared for
him. Exactly. They marry. They decide to leave
England to escape the postwar depression and
the, you know, the grayness of it all. And they
end up in Persia. But that's not the move that
defines her, is it? The pivotal moment, the one
that seems to really forge the Doris Lessing
psyche that happens in 1925. That's the one.
The move to southern Rhodesia. which is now,
of course, Zimbabwe. And looking at the records,
this wasn't some calculated career move. This
was, it feels like it was a fantasy. It was a
delusion, frankly. Alfred Taylor had heard that
you could get rich farming maize in the colonies,
so he bought 1 ,000 acres of bush. And we have
to be really clear about what bush means here.
This isn't, you know, rolling green fields ready
for a plow. Not at all. This is untamed, rough,
difficult scrubland. His vision was to become
a wealthy landowner, this colonial gentleman
farmer. The reality was something else entirely.
And the mother, Emily, she brought a completely
different set of expectations to this. this mud
hut in the middle of nowhere. Oh, she brought
the Adorian drawing room with her. She tried
to impose this rigid British class structure
on a life that was fundamentally wild and, frankly,
impoverished. The records show she was ordering
goods from London. Yes, piano tunes, Persian
rugs, silverware. She's trying to maintain this
facade of... civilized life while the farm is
failing and the money is running out and a young
doris is watching this all unfold this this clash
and that's what formed her consciousness watching
this desperate attempt to maintain appearances
it's a harsh environment for a child you have
the physical harshness of the african bush which
is obvious but then you have this psychological
pressure cooker inside the house exactly The
mother pretending their aristocracy, the father
struggling with his disability, with his PTSD,
with the failing crops. The farm delivered very
little income. It was a constant struggle for
survival. And Doris, even as a child, she saw
through the pretense. She did. She saw the enormous
gap between the story her mother was telling,
that they were refined British citizens, and
the reality of their poverty. And that skepticism,
that ability to see through social facades, it
starts right there on that maize farm. Her education
is another really fascinating piece of this puzzle
because usually when we talk about Nobel Prize
winners, we're listing off places like Cambridge,
Oxford, the Ivy League. But Lessing's CV looks
very, very different. It does. She attended a
Roman Catholic content school for a while, the
Dominican Convent High School in Salisbury, and
then spent about a year at a girls' high school.
But here's the kicker. She dropped out. At what
age? At age 13. 13. I mean, today that is almost
unheard of. But even then, for a family with
those kinds of aspirations, that must have been
a huge point of contention. It was an act of
rebellion, a profound one. She refused to fit
into the mold her mother had designed for her.
Her mother wanted a polite, educated daughter
who could marry well. Doris just wanted out.
So she leaves formal education and she never
goes back. Never. From age 13 onwards, she was
entirely self -educated. And when you look at
the sheer depth of her later work, the philosophy,
the psychology, the history, the science, it
is just staggering to think she did all of that
on her own. It is, but I think it also explains
her fierce independence of thought. She wasn't
taught what to think by a university curriculum.
She read voraciously, but she read what she could
find, and she drew her own conclusions. And she
didn't just stay on the farm reading, did she?
She left home pretty early. At 15. Just two years
after dropping out of school, she left to work
as a nursemaid for a family. And this is one
of those moments that feels like it's out of
a novel itself, a chance encounter that changes
everything. It really is. Her employer, the family
she was working for, noticed her intelligence,
her curiosity, and they started giving her books.
Not novels, though. No, books on politics and
sociology. And this was the catalyst. It's always
that one interaction, isn't it? The right book
at the right time. It was the spark. Absolutely.
She started reading about how the world worked.
about systems of power, class, colonialism. And
at the same time, around age 15, she began selling
her own stories to magazines in South Africa.
So the writer was born right there, in that moment
of adolescent struggle, fueled by these borrowed
books. So you have this teenage girl, brilliant,
self -taught, living in a colony that is racially
segregated and socially rigid. Yeah. And she's
already questioning everything. Which brings
us to her next phase. And I think this is where
the modern listener might struggle to reconcile
some of her choices. It's definitely the most
controversial part of her biography. We have
to talk about the marriages and the children.
Yes. This is the part of her life that often
generates the most heat. So in 1937, she moves
to Salisbury, the capital, now Harare, to get
away from the farm. She works as a telephone
operator. A way to get to the city. A way to
get to the city. And in 1939, she marries a civil
servant named Frank Wisdom. They have two children,
a son John and a daughter Jean. So on the surface,
a very conventional start to adult life. On the
surface. But inside, she was suffocating. She
felt trapped by domesticity, by the expectations
placed on a wife and mother at that time. The
marriage didn't last. No. They divorced in 1943.
And this is the decision that dogged her for
the rest of her life. The one that critics and
interviewers never let her forget. She left the
children. When she left the family home, she
left the two children, John and Jean, with their
father. Leaving your children in 1943. That is,
well, it's nuclear. Even today, a mother leaving
her children voluntarily is viewed with intense
suspicion. Back then, it must have been seen
as a profound moral failure. Oh, it was. The
judgment was immense. But we have to look at
her reasoning, which she was very open about
later in life. She never made excuses for it.
She analyzed it. She famously said, for a long
time, I felt I had done a very brave thing. Brave.
That's a really provocative word to use in that
context. What does she mean by that? Well, she
explained that for an intelligent woman, and
she knew she was one, spending endless time with
small children was, in her words, boring. Yeah.
But it was deeper than that. The key quote, the
one that explains everything, is this. I felt
I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I
would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated
intellectual like my mother. A frustrated intellectual
like my mother. There it is. It all comes back
to the farm. She saw her mother's bitterness,
her mother's unlived life, and she decided she
would rather be a villain in the eyes of society
than become that version of herself. Precisely.
She equated that traditional domestic motherhood
with a kind of death of the self, a spiritual
and intellectual death. And she chose the self.
It's a brutal calculus, perhaps, but it is the
absolute bedrock of the free woman themes that
permeate all of her later work. She was rejecting
the role that society said she had to play. She
refused to be the sacrificial vessel for her
family. Yeah. And instead of just running away,
she ran towards something. Right. She didn't
just go off to be a hermit. She dove right into
the political deep end. She did. Right after
the divorce, she was drawn into a circle of radicals
and joined the Left Book Club. Which was basically
a communist organization. Yes. You have to remember
the context. This was during World War II. The
Soviet Union was an ally against Hitler. And
for intellectuals in the colonies who despised
the racism and inequality they saw around them
every day, communism seemed like the only moral
alternative. And it's in this group that she
meets husband number two. Gottfried Lessing.
a German communist, an émigré. They were drawn
together by their shared political passion. They
married, had a son named Peter. Let me guess.
Well, history repeated itself to an extent. They
divorced in 1949. The political ideals couldn't
sustain the domestic reality. And just to add
a bit more texture to this period, because the
sources indicate her personal life was just incredibly
messy and passionate. It was. There was also
a significant affair going on. Yes, with an RAF
serviceman stationed in southern Rhodesia named
John Whitehorn. We know about this because she
wrote him 90 letters between 1943 and 1949. And
those letters are preserved. They are. They're
in an archive now. And they show this woman who
is just passionately engaged with ideas, with
love, with the war, but who is completely, fundamentally
unable to settle into a conventional domestic
routine. She was just wired differently. So we
get to 1949. She's 30 years old. She is twice
divorced. She has left two children behind, but
she has her youngest son, Peter, with her. And
she decides that Rhodesia is too small for her.
Can't contain her anymore. She takes Peter and
moves to London. And this is the moment Doris
Lessing, the writer we know, truly arrives. She
arrives with the manuscript of her first novel
in her suitcase. The grass is singing. She arrives
with barely any money. She arrives as a single
mother in a city that is still scarred, still
recovering from the Blitz. And she wasn't just
a writer looking for a publisher. She was arriving
as a radical, a political figure. She was. And
this is where the story takes a turn that sounds
like something out of a spy thriller. The surveillance
years. Exactly. Because we now know, thanks to
these declassified files, that she wasn't just
being watched by literary critics. She was being
watched by the state. It's incredible. The extent
of this only became clear in 2015. Yes. Yeah.
When a five -volume secret file was released
to the National Archives, five volumes, MI5 and
MI6, were monitoring her for around 20 years.
20 years starting when? It started in the early
1940s in Rhodesia because of her Communist Association's
error, and it continued when she moved to London.
Five volumes. That is a lot of paperwork for
someone who writes fiction. What were they so
afraid of? Her associations. It was the height
of the Cold War. She was a member of the Communist
Party of Great Britain. Her flat in London became
a kind of hub for radicals, for political exiles,
for writers from all over the world. And she
was an activist. A very prominent one. She campaigned
against nuclear arms. And perhaps most dangerously
in the eyes of the British establishment, she
was a very, very vocal opponent of apartheid
in South Africa. Which ironically puts her on
the right side of history. But at the time...
That got you on a watch list. It got you more
than that. It got you banned. In 1956, she was
officially prohibited from entering both South
Africa and southern Rhodesia. The ban lasted
for years. It did. She was effectively exiled
from the land where she grew up. All because
she insisted that black Africans deserved equal
rights. But, and here is that pattern again,
the one we keep seeing, she didn't stay a loyal
communist soldier, did she? No. She joined the
party, she was spied on for being in the party,
and then... She left the party. 1956 was the
breaking point for her and for many Western intellectuals.
This was the year the Soviet Union sent tanks
into Hungary to brutally crush a popular revolution.
The masks slipped. Completely, for lessing the
brutality, the hypocrisy. It was too much. She
saw the reality behind the ideology, and she
walked away. She left the Communist Party of
Great Britain that same year. It's just so fascinating
how she commits so fully to something, whether
it's a marriage or a political ideology. She
explores it to its absolute limit, and then when
she sees the cracks, she doesn't try to patch
them up. She just leaves. She was intellectually
ruthless in that way. She had no time for self
-deception. She later said she was utterly disillusioned
by the experience. And she didn't just quietly
leave, did she? Not at all. In the 1980s, she
became an extremely vocal opponent of the Soviet
Union, especially their actions in Afghanistan.
She gave a famous interview to The New York Times
where she really broke down her move away from
Marxist philosophy. What was her core criticism
of it in the end? That it ignored the spiritual
aspect of humanity. She felt it was too mechanical,
too materialistic. It had no room for the inner
life, for the non -rational parts of being human.
Which is actually a perfect segue into her writing
because her fiction tracks these intellectual
and political shifts perfectly. It's like a map
of her mind. It is. So you have what critics
call phase one. the communist or social realist
phase. This is roughly from 1944 to 1956. And
this starts with her first novel, the one she
brought to London in her suitcase. The Grass
is Singing. It came out in 1950, and it was an
immediate sensation. It's set in southern Rhodesia,
and it deals with the racial politics and, crucially,
the psychological disintegration of a white farmer's
wife, Mary Turner. It's a grim book. It's not
a happy read. No, it's raw. It's unforgiving.
But it perfectly captures the claustrophobia
of the Bush, the simmering heat, the racial tension,
the psychological collapse. It established her
as a major literary voice right out of the gate.
And her collections of African stories continued
to explore those themes. Yes, her early work
is very much rooted in that social and political
landscape. But then as her politics began to
shift, so did her fiction. Which brings us to
the big one. The book that, if you take a literature
class on the 20th century, is almost guaranteed
to be on the syllabus. The Golden Notebook. Published
in 1962. And this marks the peak of what we'd
call her psychological phase. And we have to
park here for a while. You cannot talk about
Doris Lessing without dissecting this book. Structurally,
it was like a bomb going off in the literary
world. Okay, so why? What made it so radically
different? It broke the traditional form of the
novel. Up until then, most novels were, you know,
linear narratives with a clear beginning, middle,
and end. The Golden Notebook argues that a modern
life, and specifically a modern woman's life,
cannot be contained in a single linear story.
It's too fragmented, too chaotic. So for the
listeners who haven't read it, let's break down
the architecture of the book, because it's not
just one story, is it? Not at all. You have a
frame story, which is a fairly conventional short
novel called Free Women. It's about two friends,
Anna and Molly. But interspersed within that
narrative, you have excerpts from the notebooks
of the protagonist, Anna Wolf. And she keeps
four separate notebooks to record different parts
of her life. Exactly. And the color coding is
crucial here. She's trying to compartmentalize
her experience to stop herself from falling apart.
So what are the different notebooks? There's
a black notebook, which is for her past experiences
in Africa, the source of her novel. There's a
red notebook for her political life, her time
in the Communist Party, and her growing disillusionment
with it. Then there's a yellow notebook, which
is a fictionalized version of her own painful
love affair. It's essentially a novel within
a novel. And finally, there's a blue notebook,
which is a personal diary. It records her daily
life, her dreams, her psychoanalysis sessions,
her memories. So she's trying to keep the chaos
of her life in these separate color -coded boxes
so she doesn't go crazy. Exactly. The underlying
logic is... If I can just keep the politics in
the red box and the emotions in the blue box
and the past in the black box, I can function.
But the whole point of the book is that this
doesn't work. It fails completely. The brilliance
of the book is that she does fall apart. The
barriers between the notebooks break down. The
content starts to bleed into one another. Her
life becomes too messy to categorize. And that
leads to the titular golden notebook. Yes. In
a state of mental breakdown, she attempts to
bring all the strands together into one single
golden notebook. The book explores this idea
of mental breakdown not as a failure, but as
a necessary, even positive process. A way to
strip away illusions. A way of healing and freeing
oneself from false divisions, from illusions,
and finding a new, more integrated way of being.
Now here is where it gets really complicated
culturally. This book became a bible for the
second wave feminist movement in the 60s and
70s. It was hailed as a landmark text. It was
seen as the definitive novel on the female experience.
But Lessing, she absolutely hated that label.
She despised it. She felt completely and utterly
misunderstood. She was so frustrated that people
were reducing it to a gender manifesto. I have
one of her quotes here about it. She said, what
the feminists want of me is something they haven't
examined because it comes from religion. They
want me to bear witness. It's a fantastic quote.
And she goes on to say she didn't want to stand
up and say, ha, sisters, I stand with you side
by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn
where all those beastly men are no more. It's
scathing, isn't it? But it's so consistent with
her character. Remember, she'd already walked
away from the Communist Party because she hated
the groupthink, the slogans, the dogma. And now
she saw the feminist movement developing its
own kind of dogma. Exactly, its own orthodoxies.
And she instinctively recoiled from it. She refused
to be a mascot for any movement. So what did
she think the book was about, if not feminism?
She saw the sex war, as she called it, as just
one symptom of a much larger fragmentation in
society. The real struggle was larger. It was
about the individual against the collective,
the self against delusion, about the fragmentation
of consciousness itself in the modern world.
To focus solely on gender was, for her, missing
the entire point. And this book wasn't a one
-off. It was part of a larger project during
this phase, right? Yes. It sits alongside her
five -novel sequence, the Children of Violence
series. That series follows a character named
Martha Quest from her youth in Africa to her
old age in a post -apocalyptic Britain. It covers
much of the same psychological and political
ground. So she writes this masterpiece of realism
and psychology. She's the undisputed queen of
the literary scene. And then she does it again.
She pivots. And this time she pivots so hard
she nearly falls off the map for some people.
She pivots into deep space. The space fiction
phase. I love this part because it is so wonderfully,
willfully unexpected. And if you were a literary
critic in 1979, you probably just threw your
hands up in despair. You have this celebrated
author of realistic psychological fiction, and
suddenly, in the late 70s and early 80s, she
starts writing about interstellar empires and
aliens. And we need to correct a misconception
here. This wasn't her, you know, losing the plot
or going through some strange midlife crisis.
This was a deli - deliberate philosophical shift.
And it was driven by her new intellectual passion.
It was driven by her deep interest in Sufism.
We touched on this briefly, her feeling that
Marxism lacked a spiritual dimension. She found
that dimension in Sufism, particularly through
the teachings of Idris Shah. Right. Shah became
her good friend and teacher. And for Lessing,
Sufism wasn't so much a religion as it was a
system of cognitive evolution. What's the core
idea there? The core idea is that humanity is
asleep. We're living in a daze of conditioned
responses, cultural programming, petty squabbles,
and ego -driven desires. The purpose of life
in this view is to wake up to a higher, more
objective consciousness. And science fiction
or space fiction, as she insisted on calling
it. A term she borrowed from C .S. Lewis. Right.
That became the perfect vehicle for exploring
this idea. If you want to write about humanity
being asleep, it really helps to adopt the perspective
of an alien race that is fully awake. Precisely.
Which brings us to the Canopus in Argos archive
series, a sequence of five novels. And the basic
premise is what? It's an allegorical history
of humankind told from the perspective of an
advanced interstellar society called Canopus.
They're trying to accelerate the evolution of
life on other worlds, including ours. And Earth
has a different name in these books. Earth is
called Shikasta, which essentially translates
from Persian as the broken one or the damaged
one. That says it all, really. It does. The first
novel is framed as a series of reports and case
studies from Canopian agents observing Earth.
It's a God's eye view or rather an advanced alien's
eye view. And this perspective allowed her to
recontextualize all the themes she had written
about before. All of them. War, racism, communism,
feminism. From the perspective of Canopus, these
aren't grand, tragic, heroic struggles. They
are symptoms of a degenerative disease. They
are the squabbles of infants on a minor damaged
planet. So how did the literary world react to
this? The critics? They were not having it. The
reception was mixed at best, and in many cases,
openly hostile. The New York Times review was
particularly brutal, wasn't it? Scathing. The
critic, John Leonard, who had praised her earlier
work, basically accused her of betraying her
talent. He wrote that she was propagandizing
on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic
razzmatazz. Cosmic razzmatazz, ouch. It's a great
line, but it completely misses the point of what
she was trying to do. But Lessing fought back.
She didn't apologize or backtrack. Not for a
second. She argued that science fiction contains
some of the best social fiction of our time.
She felt that while the so -called literary writers
were stuck analyzing another middle -class divorce
in Hampstead, the sci -fi writers were asking
the real questions. Those were the questions
that interested her. She really admired writers
like Greg Baer and Olaf Stapleton. She saw the
genre not as an escape from reality, but as a
laboratory for exploring it on a grander scale.
And she put her money where her mouth was. She
actually went to the World Science Fishing Convention
in 1987 as the guest of honor. Which is a fantastic
image, isn't it? The grand dame of British literature,
the Nobel laureate -in -waiting, hanging out
with the sci -fi crowd because she felt they
were the only ones asking the important questions.
It just shows her total lack of pretension. She
followed the idea wherever it led her. If the
idea led to a mud hut in Rhodesia, she went there.
If it led to a psychological breakdown in a London
flat, she went there. And if it led to Zone 3
on a planet run by a galactic empire, she went
there too. It's also worth noting, this wasn't
totally out of the blue. Her novels Briefing
for a Descent into Hell and Memoirs of a Survivor
were already blurring the lines of reality. They
were the precursors. They were novels about inner
space, about madness and memory that showed she
was already moving beyond conventional realism
long before Canopus. Speaking of a lack of pretension
and maybe a healthy dose of mischief, we have
to talk about the prank, the Jane Summers hoax.
Oh, this is legendary in publishing circles.
It's my favorite story about her. It's brilliant.
This was in 1982. By this point, Lessing is incredibly
famous. Her name alone guarantees sables in reviews.
But she had a theory. She believed the publishing
industry had become lazy and complacent. She
believed that new unknown authors had almost
no chance of getting a fair reading and that
established authors were published regardless
of the quality of their work, simply because
of their famous name. So she decided to run an
experiment to test the system. A magnificent
one. She wrote two novels, The Diary of a Good
Neighbor and If the Old Could. But she didn't
put her name on them. She created a pseudonym.
Jane Summers. And she sent them to her own publishers.
To her own UK publisher, Jonathan Cape, who had
made millions of pounds off her work over the
decades. And they rejected them. That is the
ultimate gotcha. I mean, you can't make that
up. It is. They sent her standard rejection letters.
They didn't recognize her voice, her style, her
genius. They just saw an unsolicited manuscript
from an unknown woman. So what happened to the
books? They were eventually published by other
houses. Michael Joseph in the UK and Alfred A.
Knopf in the US, but purely on their perceived
merit as debut novels. And they sold very few
copies. Because nobody knew who Jane Summers
was. Exactly. When Lessing finally revealed the
ruse, it caused a massive uproar. It was a huge
embarrassment for the critics who'd ignored the
books and for the publishers who'd rejected them.
She proved her point in the most dramatic way
possible. She proved that the machinery of fame
often drives the industry, not necessarily the
writing itself. It was such a punk rock move
for a woman in her 60s. It really highlights
her role as a provocateur. She wasn't just this
serious intellectual. She loved to poke the bear.
She really did, which... Brings us to her very
complicated relationship with official honors.
Because for someone who loved to poke the bear,
the establishment kept trying to give her medals.
And she kept saying no. She declined an OBE in
1977. And then, more dramatically, she declined
a damehood in 1992. Turning down a damehood is
a big deal. The press certainly thought so. What
was her reasoning? Why turn it down? It was very
specific and very consistent with her anti -colonial
roots. She said she couldn't accept an honor
that was linked to a non -existent empire. So
it was the dame of the British Empire part she
objected to. Exactly. The empire was gone, and
she had spent her youth watching the damage that
empire did in Africa. For her, accepting the
title would have been a betrayal of her own history
and principles. That's a very fair point. Yeah.
But she didn't say no to everything. No, she
wasn't reflexively anti -establishment. She was
principled. In 1999, she accepted the Companion
of Honor. Why that one? Because its citation
is for a conspicuous national service. And it's
in the personal gift of the monarch. It has no
link to the empire. For her, the distinction
was crucial. And of course, she eventually accepted
the ultimate prize. The Nobel Prize in Literature
in 2007. She was the 11th woman... in 106 years
to win it. And at the time, she was the oldest
winner of the literature prize ever at 88 years
old. And the scene when she found out is just
perfectly quintessentially Lessing. It's wonderful.
She was coming home from a trip to the grocery
store. She gets out of a black cab with her shopping
bags and there's a huge swarm of reporters and
cameras waiting on her doorstep. And her reaction?
She just sat down on her front steps looking
exhausted and said, oh Christ. She wasn't overwhelmed
with gratitude. She was just sort of resigned
to all the fuss it was going to cause. Still,
the citation from the Swedish Academy is beautiful.
They called her the ethicist of the female experience,
who, with skepticism, fire, and visionary power,
has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.
Skepticism, fire, and visionary power. I mean,
that sums her up perfectly, doesn't it? It really
does. But there is a curious... Almost sad final
detail about her Nobel medal itself. The auction.
The auction. Yes. In 2017, just four years after
her death, her Nobel medal was put up for auction.
It was only the second time a literature medal
had ever been sold like that. Why? We don't really
know. It speaks perhaps to the unsentimental
nature of her estate or maybe just the financial
realities that follow literary legacies. But
in a strange way, it feels fitting. She never
cared about the hardware, the prizes, the medals.
She only ever cared about the work. Let's talk
about the end of her journey. She lived a very,
very long and full life. She did. She suffered
a stroke in the late 1990s, which was devastating
for her because it stopped her from traveling.
And travel had been her lifeblood observing Africa,
Europe. The world. But she remained active. Oh,
yes. In her later years, she was still a fixture
at the theater and the opera in London. But she
became preoccupied with death. There's a note
in one of her diaries where she's asking herself
if she would have time to finish a new book.
A writer until the very, very end. The fear wasn't
death itself, but the unfinished sentence. That's
it, exactly. She died on November 17, 2013, at
her home in West Hampstead, London. She was 94.
The official cause was kidney failure and sepsis.
She was survived by her daughter, Jean. Who she
had reconnected with in later life. But sadly,
both of her sons, John and Peter, had pre -deceased
her. Which is a profound tragedy for any parent.
To outlive your children. It is. But her literary
legacy is absolutely secure. Her papers are now
archived for future scholars. A massive collection
at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. 76 boxes
of manuscripts, notebooks, letters. And the University
of East Anglia holds her more personal archives,
including those passionate love letters to John
Whitehorn we mentioned earlier. Some of those
were embargoed for years, keeping her secrets
just a little bit longer. So if we look back
at this incredible life, I mean, born in Persia,
raising maize in the Rhodesian bush, leaving
her family to become a revolutionary, being spied
on by MI5, writing these realistic masterpieces
that defined a generation, and then pivoting
to write about space aliens and Sufi mysticism,
and finally winning the Nobel. What is the core
theme here? What's the thread that ties it all
together? I think the core theme is a refusal
to be categorized. A profound, lifelong refusal.
She was a chameleon, but not because she was
hiding or trying to fit in. She changed because
she was constantly growing. She moved from communism
to Sufism, from realism to science fiction. From
abandoned mother to literary matriarch. She never,
ever let her past self dictate who her future
self could be. So it's the courage to change
your mind, isn't it? Publicly and completely.
Absolutely. And that is perhaps the rarest and
most valuable quality. In a world, especially
in our current time, where we so often feel pressured
to pick a team, to pick an identity, and then
to defend it to the death. Lessing represents
the power of intellectual flexibility. There's
that quote of hers that critical thinking is
essential in a world of information overload.
And she lived that. She was willing to stand
up and say, you know what? I used to believe
this with all my heart, but I've looked at it
again and now I see it differently. She did it
publicly and she did it radically time and time
again. And that is a really powerful thought
to leave our listeners with. Are we, are any
of us? capable of that kind of radical change
today? Can we look at our own most deeply held
beliefs with that much skepticism and that much
fire? That is the challenge she leaves behind.
Not just to read her incredible books, but to
try and adopt her mindset, to be willing to break
the mold, even if you're the one who spent half
your life building it. Okay, let's unpack this.
Or actually, I think we have unpacked this quite
thoroughly. Doris Lessing, a life lived without
a safety net. Thank you for listening to this
deep dive. Thank you. Until next time.