In a little over a week Doris Lessing is to celebrate her 88th birthday – the Nobel Prize for Literature seems a fine and fitting gift.

She is not short of reward or glory: three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made a Companion of Honour just before the turn of the millennium, she refused to be made a Dame of the British Empire on the ground that said empire no longer existed. Such a refusal encapsulates the mix of passion, politics and prose (though she has also written plays and poems) that has made her one of Britain’s most treasured writers.

Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, published in 1949, marked her arrival on these shores, in literary and in physical terms. It was published in London by Michael Joseph after her departure from what was then Rhodesia. It marked the beginning of her preoccupation with the roles of blacks and whites in Africa, where she had grown up – and her continuing interest in who the outsiders are in any society. She never flinched from depicting uncomfortable truths in her fiction: in 1956 she was declared a prohibited alien in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

Martha Quest, published in 1952, marked the beginning of a sequence of five novels that Lessing christened her Children of Violence series; like Lessing, Martha Quest is a girl growing up on an impoverished African farm and defining herself as a rebel. The final novel in the sequence, The Four-Gated City, brought Martha from Africa to London, and showed her readers the future – to this day Lessing’s taste for alternative worlds has not waned. It is peculiar, perhaps, that science fiction is perceived as a male genre when so many of its serious and gifted practioners – Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood – have been women.

The Four-Gated City came seven years after what many regard as her most significant novel, The Golden Notebook (1962). The tale of Anna Wulf is stylistically complex as her personality breaks down and reforms. In the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade, Lessing said that her purpose in writing The Golden Notebook was to demonstrate “that to divide off and compartmentalise living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble”. Anna is a character who tries to live within a completely free way – as an early critic noted, with the freedom of a man, a notion that perhaps reveals why Lessing’s relationship with the feminist movement has often been a vexed one. It is a seminal book and its themes and concerns are no less significant nearly 50 years after it was first published.

In 1979 she began her Canopus in Argos series, science fiction which led her to collaborate with Philip Glass on an opera, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Recent books, such as Mara and Dann and her latest novel, The Cleft, have kept to alternative worlds, though The Cleft received distinctly mixed reviews.

For those who think she might be far too serious for their tastes, there’s always her passion for cats: her vignettes of feline life, Particularly Cats, were revised and reissued in 1991. It’s to be hoped that a current companion will be purring with contentment at her win.

Highlights

–– The Grass is Singing (1949) – her first novel, in which the heroine falls in love with a black houseboy with devastating results

–– Martha Quest (1952) – opening of the Children of Violence series The Golden Notebook (1962) – Anna Wulf’s attempt to live a life of freedom The Good Terrorist (1985) – life in the militant Left

–– Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) – autobiographies up to 1949 and 1962 respectively

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