How Doris Lessing's mother unknowingly sacrificed her career for art

Cover image from Amazon of Lessing's novel about her parents

The mother of Nobel laureate Doris Lessing was a nurse before and during World War I. She loved her work, and was offered a job as a hospital matron at the age of thirty-two, a remarkable achievement for a woman of her times.

However, Emily Tayler did not take up the post Matron of St. George's Hospital in London. Instead, she married Alfred, who had been wounded in the war and later fitted with a wooden leg. Embittered by the political decisions that had killed a generation of young men and cost him a limb, Alfred refused to stay on in England after the war. The couple went first to Iran (Persia), where Doris was born in 1919, and later to Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), where her father established a farm.

As Doris grew up, she began to observe the world around her. It was the injustice she witnessed under the racist regime that governed the then British colony that first compelled her to write. In Zimbabwe, Doris became a communist and married political activist Gottfried Lessing. They later divorced, and Doris Lessing went on to become a brilliant and prolific writer.

In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her enormous and varied body of work. During her long writing life, she has won every possible literary prize. She also declined the title of Dame of the British Empire because she had written so much against imperialism. She has been called a feminist writer, but calls the term too simple.

If Emily Tayler had refused to give up her career, declined to emigrate with her husband as he moved from England to Persia to Rhodesia, Doris would not have been born. The world would have been deprived of one of the greatest visionary writers of the twentieth century.

If Lessing's writing are anything to go by, she and her mother never got on terribly well. All the more reason why Emily deserves our thanks for her indirect and unintentional contribution to art: giving birth to and raising her challenging daughter, Doris.

Writers, Lessing has said, are mirrors who reflect society to itself. From the lyrical tragedy of The Grass is Singing (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1950) to Alfred and Emily (HarperCollins, 2008) she has faithfully held up that mirror.

Lessing says of her parents in the foreword of Alfred and Emily that WWI "did them both in." The novella is an attempt to "give them lives as might have been if there had been no World War One." Aged 89 when this novella about her parents was published, she finds herself still trying to get free of the "monstrous legacy" of that same war.

Thank you, Emily, and Alfred, for giving the world your daughter. And thank you, Doris Lessing, for your unblinking record of so much of the passing history that you lived through during the century that horrified, nurtured, and ultimately inhabited you.