The Novels of Doris Lessing: Catastrophe and Survival

Doris Lessing (b. 1919), considered by many critics to be Britain’s most important contemporary woman novelist, has been probing deeply into the question of what it means to be an emancipated woman in today’s complex and male-oriented society, especially a woman involved with politics, with writing, with love and sex- a woman who frankly admits her sexuality, who refuses to compromise her essential being. This first full-length book on Doris Lessing explores the problematics of survival in her novels which is characterized by a vision rooted in a complex set of interrelated themes such as colonialism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and Sufi mysticism. With these creative preoccupations, Lessing in her entire oeuvre tries to provide a focus on the complex fate of man in the modern world. By locating man between the two extremes of the victim and the rebel, she looks upon him as a struggling survivor in a hostile, catastrophic world. What adds further strength to this theme is the fact that in the world of Lessing, survival is not confined to the individual alone; it encompasses societies, nations, and finally the planet earth itself.