'A Radical Imagination' – Doris Lessing in the Spectator

Doris Lessing’s obituaries, as much as her writings, bear witness to the great turbulences of the twentieth century. How many of us spent our childhood in two countries which have both since changed their names? But ‘exotic’ was the last word Lessing would have used to describe herself: ‘I am 85, an Englishwoman (with Scottish and Irish tinctures) living in London‘, she insisted in one tart correspondence in our letters page.

Though happy to pose as a mere correspondent several times over the course of forty years (oh, to crack her username at CoffeeHouse comments!), the Nobel winner was also a regular Spectator contributor. Exploring her archive left me queasy about daring to critique her, even after death: she famously used our pages to describe her unauthorised biographer, Carole Klein as ‘a happy chipmunk that has just found a stash of hallucinogenic mushrooms’, before listing a litany of factual errors. (I suppose it’s not difficult to fact check your own life.)