DORIS LESSING COURSE 2025
Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny
Live online course
Thursdays, 11 September to 23 October 2025, 6.00 to 8.00 pm British Time
Doris Lessing is one of the most important British writers of recent years. She was described by Margaret Drabble as ‘the kind of writer who changes people’s lives’, and in 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Like Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing is highly perceptive of the history of her times, recording their major events through the eyes of her female protagonists.
Doris Lessing’s novels deal with racial and sexual discrimination, war, poverty, political and humanitarian commitment and climate change. She explores the full spectrum of human experience. Born in 1919, just after the First World War, Doris Lessing spent her youth in colonial Southern Africa and witnessed the nefarious effects of the colour bar. Mistrusting ideologies and debunking stereotypes, she was interested in inter-personal relationships as well as the divisions and contradictions of the self. Her heroines strive towards an ideal of harmony and justice, weaving collective conscience into their personal identities, aiming for comprehension, freedom and growth.
The Nobel Prize committee described her as a great writer ‘of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny’.
In this course, we will study four of Doris Lessing’s most interesting novels, exploring both her realistic and non-realistic writing techniques to represent women’s perception of reality in its changing historical context.
Live online course: four lectures and seminars, Thursdays, fortnightly, starting 11 September 2025, 6.00 to 8.00 pm.
Our lecturer is Dr Anne-Laure Brevet, University of Cambridge.
Lecture 1. The Grass Is Singing (1950)
Doris Lessing’s first book and undisputed masterpiece, a gripping novel set in colonial Africa. This traces with great psychological depth the unexplained circumstances of the murder of a white woman by her African servant.
Lecture 2. Martha Quest (1952)
Set in the late 1930s, this is the first volume of the autobiographical series The Children of Violence. It shows Martha Quest as a rebellious teenager impossibly striving for freedom in a Southern African country. The novel is a realistic portrait of the author’s tormented younger self and her growing abhorrence of the white colonials’ traditionalist and racist society.
Lecture 3. The Golden Notebook (1962)
One of the most influential books of the 1960s, and inspirational for feminists, it conveys with a multitude of intertwined sub-stories the struggle of a woman writer to live independently and overcome a writer’s block, at a time when political commitment was at its most intense.
Lecture 4. The Summer before the Dark (1973)
This novel traces a middle-aged woman’s journey through depression and self-recovery. It offers a critique of stereotyped sex roles and puts into question traditional mothering roles. It is a powerful account of an identity crisis caused by ageing in a society in which appearances prevail over ethical concerns.
Doris Lessing, Cologne, 2006. Photo credit: Elke Wetzig, WikiCommons
Lecture list
Lecture 1. The Grass is Singing, 11 Sept. 2025
Lecture 2. Martha Quest, 25 Sept. 2025
Lecture 3. The Golden Notebook, 9 Oct. 2025
Lecture 4. The Summer before the Dark, 23 Oct. 2025
Optional further reading: works by Doris Lessing
African Stories (1965)
The Children of Violence (1952-1969)
The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984)
The Fifth Child (1988)
Under My Skin (autobiography, 1994)
The Sweetest Dream (2001)
Optional secondary reading
• Kevin Brazil, David Sergeant, and Tom Sperlinger, eds., Doris Lessing and the Forming of History (2016)
• Patrick French, The Golden Woman: The Authorised Biography of Doris Lessing (2024)
• Elizabeth Maslen, Doris Lessing (1994)
• Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979)
• Paul Schlueter ed., A Small Personal Voice: Doris Lessing, Essays, Reviews, Interviews (1974)
Links
Doris Lessing interview on her writing career.
Doris Lessing Society.
Doris Lessing: A Retrospective website, listing Lessing’s works.
Guardian article on 5 of Doris Lessing’s books, November 2013.
Course fees
£210 full price for 4 sessions
£190 students, CAMcard holders
£190 members of the Doris Lessing Society
Prices include VAT at 20%
Zoom link
We will send you a Zoom link by email approximately 24 hours before the course begins. If the link does not arrive, please let us know by email in good time, at least an hour before the session begins, so we can re-send.
Recordings
This is a 4-session course, with a live online lecture and seminar each fortnight. The lectures are recorded so that participants can listen again during the course if they wish. The seminars are not recorded.
If you cannot attend a course you have booked
Please note that, because places are limited, we cannot usually give refunds if you cannot attend a course. But if you contact us in advance, we might be able to transfer your booking to a different course.