In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.ĭuring the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and later had two children.
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia her mother had been a nurse.
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