Doris Lessing R.I.P – 2013

  • Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.” – Doris Lessing

    Doris Lessing
    (image via Litencyc.)

    Margaret Drabble Doris is my hero..

    She was a good cook, and enjoyed seeing other people eat and drink. Her company was miscellaneous – African writers and politicians, feminist publishers from the antipodes, people she’d met at a Russian evening class, scientists, novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists, campaigners, translators, an old lady who lived down the (rather shabby) street.

    Eileen Battersby

    Doris Lessing: matriarch, prophet, maverick
    Author’s death, a week shy of her 95th birthday, marks end of fittingly long life of enduring survivor

    NYtimes.. obit – (more complete summary of her life except for a quote from Michiko Kakutani).

    Guardian Obit – her younger son died 3 weeks ago.

  • Doris Lessing passed away

    J M Coetzee called her “one of the great visionary novelists of our time” .

  • Previous post: Doris Lessing.. (On her birthday in 2007 – the year she won her nobel prize..)


    Doris and her mother – a capable and talented woman who was extremely frustrated.

  • Paris Review

  • Doris Lessing: a model for every writer coming from the back of beyondMargaret Atwood

    Inventive, brave, down-to-earth – she never hedged her bets or pulled her punches, doing everything with all her heart.

    If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges.

    (Happy birthday Margaret Atwood! – Nov 18)

  • Doris Lessing Org.

  • Click to see large
    Doris with Philip Glass

    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 Opera

  • Paul Krugman’s cats were named Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein.

  • *Hanif Kureishi first informed me of the sad news of her passing on Facebook this morning.

  • You don’t discover the Sufi message from a writer. Sufism is something you experience on your own. It’s the same for Buddhism. You can’t read a book and receive enlightenment. (via)