Where to start with Doris Lessing: a guide to her best works

Throughout May, we’re celebrating Doris Lessing and her 1985 shortlisted work, The Good Terrorist, which is our latest Book of the Month. But this one novel is a mere fragment of an extraordinary body of work from the author, which spanned around 70 titles across a writing career of nearly 80 years. Lessing was a Nobel Prize winner, was nominated for both the Booker Prize and International Booker Prize on multiple occasions, and is arguably one of the most important writers of the last century.  

Lessing was always an expansive writer, in both form and content, and constantly pushed the novel over the edge of convention. She was unafraid to explore subject matter that might be considered taboo, or that was frowned upon by serious literary critics or that seemed unworthy of a writer of her stature. Yet, she was, at times, pigeonholed by readers and critics alike throughout her long career. In an interview with The New York Times, Lessing said: ‘I’ve been stereotyped differently at different times. I can’t remember them all… when my first books came out I was called a writer about race problems, then I was described as a political writer about communism, then a women’s writer, then a mystic writer.’ It seems that the urge to categorise and order runs against Lessing’s skills as a writer. She was searching for a way of writing fiction that would permit her to go wherever her capacious imagination led her.  

In her novels, we have a record of a boundaryless mind surveying all in its wake. But where to begin with such a writer? Whether you’re familiar with Lessing’s work and would like to know what to pick up next, or are new to her legacy and would like to know where to start, here is a walk-through of the best of her career. 

Inner space fiction  

Lessing began her writing career working in the Marxist-realist tradition, which is typified by its belief in the close relationship between politics and aesthetic concerns. Later on, her interest in Sufism, a mystic body of Islamic religious practice, led to work that fused her penchant for capturing social realities and the psychic struggle of the individual and collective with a mystical dimension. These works have been termed ‘inner space fiction’. ‘I see inner and outer space as reflections of each other. I don’t see them as in opposition. Just as we are investigating subatomic particles and the outer limits of the planetary system – the large and the small simultaneously – so the inner and the outer are connected,’ Lessing said. In this vein, she wrote Briefing for a Descent into Hell, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1971. It’s a novel about the life of Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge - a ‘mad’ man who is placed in a mental hospital where doctors ply him with various drugs intended to bring him back to normalcy. But he is far away, spinning on a raft in the Atlantic before he is carried off into outer space.  

Another example of Lessing’s inner space fiction is the classic The Golden Notebook (1962), the account of the fragmented consciousness of British women after World War II. Lessing viewed this novel as ‘an attempt to break a form; to break certain forms of consciousness and go beyond them’. While writing, she said, ‘I found I did not believe some of the things I thought I believed: or rather, that I hold in my mind at the same time beliefs and ideas that are apparently contradictory. Why not? We are, after all, living in the middle of a whirlwind. Using form to break through the divide of inner and outer form.’  

Man and woman  

Lessing was fascinated by gender dynamics in society, which changed dramatically from the period of her early writing in the 1940s to the time of her death in 2013, and it’s these changes and tensions she recorded throughout her work. Her 1973 novel The Summer Before the Dark tells the story of Kate Brown, a ‘pretty, healthy, serviceable’ housewife. Kate becomes disillusioned by the docile role she occupies in her life when her children leave home and her husband has one too many affairs. She starts work as a translator for an international conference, changes her hair and embarks on an affair. But when Kate gets sick, she spends a week in a hotel in a fever that causes her to dislodge from family life. From then on, she wanders the streets in ill-fitting clothes and discovers she is now unattractive to men. In The Summer Before the Dark, Lessing unravelled the performance of beauty as a stipulation in womanhood, and shows what happens when a woman refuses to conform.