Doris Lessing: quiet radical on a lifelong escape mission

Nobel Prize-winning British author Doris Lessing spent decades trying to escape her unhappy family life as well as being labelled a feminist and leftist icon, and it made for gripping reading in her novels.
Hailed as one of Britain's greatest contemporary writers, Lessing, who has died aged 94, was best-known for her 1962 novel "The Golden Notebook", considered a landmark work amongst many feminists.
But she charmed generations of readers with more than 50 other works over six decades, ranging from searing critiques of colonialism to science fiction, plays, short stories, poetry and two operas.
In 2007, aged 87, she became the oldest ever winner of the Nobel Literature Prize for the "scepticism, fire and visionary power" with which she scrutinised society, often through works inspired by her lonely childhood in Africa and experience of radical politics.

Lessing was out grocery shopping at the time of the Nobel announcement, and only found out when she returned to her London home to find crowds of journalists swarming outside.
She responded with a characteristic, "Oh, Christ," before sitting down on her doorstep with her head in her hands.

Tributes have poured in for the author, with Charlie Redmayne, chief executive of her British publisher HarperCollins, describing her as "one of the great writers of our age".
"She was a compelling storyteller with a fierce intellect and a warm heart," he said.
Doris May Taylor was born to British parents in 1919 in Khermanshah, in what is now Iran. She spent her formative years on a farm in Southern Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe -- after her parents moved there in the 1920s.

It was, she later reflected, a "hellishly lonely" upbringing.
Her strict mother sent her to a convent school where the nuns terrified the children with tales of hell and damnation.
She dropped out at the age of 13 and continued to educate herself by reading the works of great authors, including Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy, before becoming a nursemaid at the age of 15.
Unsurprisingly, she could not wait to escape and in 1939 married Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children before their divorce in 1943.
She then married German political activist Gottfried Lessing, but divorced again in 1949. She fled to Britain with the manuscript of her first novel, "The Grass Is Singing", in her suitcase.