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“Oh, Christ!” was her response to the news that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was one of the best spectacles of last year — the Queen of English letters alighting from a taxi like Boadicea from her chariot, apparently more concerned with her shopping than the crowning honour of her career.

Lessing is a member of the lost white tribe of old colonials, born and raised in countries that no longer exist. She was born to English parents in Persia and grew up in Rhodesia. After the failure of her second marriage in 1949, she moved to London, and her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. Her Children of Violence series, with the troubled protagonist Martha Quest, reflected Lessing’s rejection of the constraints placed on traditional women’s lives. Martha and Doris were both involved with communism, although Lessing later left the party.

She is also a writer who can smell a storm brewing. The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, is one of the earliest and greatest texts of the modern feminist movement. Its heroine, Anna Wulf, is a writer in crisis, recording her life in a series of coloured notebooks. During the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing used science fiction as a medium for exploring moral and political ideas. She did not, however, abandon realism — Love, Again (1996) is a brilliantly disturbing dismemberment of romantic love.

Lessing is now a writer of truly international stature, having won almost every prize going except (strangely) the Booker. The Swedish Academy elegantly summed her up as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

One to read: The Golden Notebook (1961)

More about Doris Lessing

Lessing 'delighted' to win Nobel prize

Listen to Lessing talking about her life

Erica Wagner on Lessing

David Baddiel on Lessing's Nobel prize

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