英美报刊选读Lesson 22

• Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was here that Doris was born in 1919. The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush.
Doris Lessing
• In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was described by the Swedish Academy as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”. Lessing is the eleventh woman to win the prize in its 106-year history, and also the oldest person ever to win the literature award.
• She began writing around this time. In 1937,
Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a
telephone operator, and sheband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children, before the marriage ended in 1943.
Lesson 22 Lessing’s Law: You’re Never Too Old to Be Outrageous
• Background information • About the passage • Discuss
Background information
• Doris May Lessing CH, OBE (née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a Zimbabwean-British writer, author of works such as the novels The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook.
• Following her divorce, Lessing was drawn to the Left Book Club, a communist book club, and it was here that she met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group and had a child together, before the marriage also ended in divorce in 1949. Gottfried Lessing later became the East German ambassador to Uganda, and was murdered in the 1979 rebellion against Idi Amin Dada.
• Lessing’s mother attempted to lead an Edwardian life style amongst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; it was not. The farm was not successful and failed to deliver the wealth the Taylers had expected.
• Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare). Lessing left school aged 14, and thereafter was self-educated. She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, and it was around this time that Lessing started reading material on politics and sociology that her employer gave her to read.
• Lessing was born in Persia (Iran) on Oct 22, 1919 to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), who were both English and of British nationality. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation.