Doris Lessing Donates Correspondence to University
Nobel prize winning author Doris Lessing has donated
a collection of her personal letters to the University of East Anglia. Some of the correspondence includes letters she wrote explaining why she turned down the offer of a Damehood.
Doris Lessing described winning the Nobel prize as a "bloody disaster", so perhaps it's unsurprising that she turned down a Damehood. Offered the honour in 1992 by Alex Allan, then principal private secretary to the prime minister, Lessing declined on the grounds that the British Empire no longer exists.
"Thank you for offering me this honour: I am very pleased. But for some time now I have been wondering, 'But where is this British Empire?', Lessing wrote to Allan. "Surely, there isn't one. And now I see that I am not the only one saying the same. There is something ruritannical about honours given in the name of a non-existent Empire."
Lessing, now 89, said that when she was young, she did her best "to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia", saying that "surely there is something unlikeable about a person, when old, accepting honours from a institution she attacked when young?".
Her letter to Allan finished on a whimsical note. "And yet... how pleasant to be a dame! I would adore it. Dame of what? Dame of Britain? Dame of the British Islands? Dame of the British Commonwealth? Dame of ....? Never mind. Please forgive my churlishness. I am sorry, I really am."
We have no doubt that the rest of her correspondence is equally interesting. What a shame it will be when there are no more letters to read. Will they print out a famous author's emails and display them in a case in a museum? Somehow, it's just not the same.
Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing is just as feisty as ever. She talked
to Time magazine about winning the Nobel Prize, writing and dictator Robert Mugabe.
When reporters informed you that you had won the Nobel Prize last October, your first words were "Oh, Christ." Were you at all excited?
No, I wasn't. If I may be catty, Sweden doesn't have anything else. There's not a great literary tradition, so they make the most of the Nobel.
The Nobel committee described you as the "epicist of the female experience." Do you agree with that?
Well, they had to say something....I can just see somebody sitting there thinking, 'What the hell are we going to say about this one? She doesn't like being called a feminist so what'll we say?' So they scribbled that."
*****
You were a prohibited alien in South Africa and Rhodesia for 30 years for speaking out against apartheid and white rule. What do you think of Robert Mugabe?
He's a monstrous little terror. Mbeki from South Africa supports him and a lot of the other black leaders have only just decided that he's bad. They don't like to criticize one of their own. Mugabe has created a caste, a layer of people just like himself who are corrupt and crooked. It's not a question of just getting rid of Mugabe and everything will be alright because it won't be.
Unfortunately she also says that she just doesn't have the energy to write much anymore and her upcoming book, Alfred and Emily, will probably be her last. Alfred and Emily details Doris' childhood in Southern Rhodesia. It also examines the devastating effects of World War I on her family.
Doris Lessing Too Ill to Deliver Nobel Acceptance Speech
Doris Lessing is too ill to fly to Stockholm to give her speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, but she has written the speech. Her publisher will read it at the ceremony.
The foundation, which had said Lessing would be unable to attend the prize ceremony because of ill health, said on Monday Nicholas Pearson would read out Lessing's address on December 7.
"She has back problems," foundation spokeswoman Annika Pontikis said.
The lectures by each winner are a highlight of Nobel Week celebrations, which include ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo to award the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.57 million) prize.
Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek, who won the literature prize in 2004, and British playwright Harold Pinter, the 2005 winner, also missed the ceremony but both pre-recorded their traditional lectures for airing during Nobel week.
Given Doris' penchant for outspoken thought, we hope that her publisher has an excellent speaking voice and a good sense of irony. It's really a shame that she can't be there to accept the award in person. Science fiction writers are thrilled that one of their own won a Nobel Prize and will no doubt be interested to hear what hear her acceptance speech.
Why Doris Lessing Won the Nobel Prize for Literature
Doris Lessing's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature thrilled many people -- other than Harold Bloom, of course -- especially science fiction fans who called it a great victory for the genre. In this short video, Horace Engdahl reveals how Doris Lessing's "second peak," in which she created groundbreaking works about women and about male-female relationships, was a major factor in awarding her the Literature Prize. He also nearly slips and reveals that she has been considered before for the prize. He caught himself before he gave away the inner secrets of the committee, unfortunately.
For those unfamiliar with Lessing, Engdahl says to start with her first book, The Grass is Singing.
88 year-old British author Doris Lessing has won
the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although has written 50 books, she is best known for The Golden Notebook, published in 1962. The book is considered a pioneering work on male-female relations, that helped inspire the burgeoning feminist movement. Doris' reaction to the winning the vaunted literary prize was pretty hilarious.
Doris Lessing was out grocery shopping near her home in London yesterday when the Swedish Academy announced she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. She returned from the store to find a media circus, the wire services reported.
"Oh Christ!" she said, when told about the monumental honor. "I couldn't care less."
"This has been going on for 30 years," Lessing told the journalists. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."
Holding an impromptu news conference, the prickly Lessing said, "I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. . . . I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."
Jonathan Burnham of HarperCollins, Lessing's publisher in the United States, was at the Frankfurt Book Fair when the announcement was made. "Doris is one of the most important writers of this generation," he said from Germany. "And as a woman writer, she has broken through boundaries and given inspiration to a whole new generation."
For six decades, British novelist Lessing has written works of fiction that explore the sometimes painful intertwining of the political and the personal.
In awarding her the prize-of-all-writing-prizes, the academy championed Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."
Lessing's work had been of great importance both to other writers and to the broader field of literature, academy secretary Horace Engdahl told Reuters. He said members of the academy had discussed her as a potential laureate for years.
"Now the moment was right. Perhaps we could say that she is one of the most carefully considered decisions in the history of the Nobel Prize," Engdahl told the news service. "She has opened up a new area of experience that earlier had not been very accepted in literature. That has to do with, for instance, female sexuality."
Typically, Harold Bloom weighed in by dismissing Lessing as a "fourth rate science fiction author." He said she had some good stuff early in her career, but he didn't like any of her "second wave" of work. But that's
Harold for you -- he never has a good word to say about anyone's work but his own.
