Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

(Paperback)

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This is the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobigraphy, beginning with her childhood in Africa, taking us through her marriages, the birth of her children, involvement in communist politics, and ending on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel, "The Grass is Singing", in her suitcase. It tells the story of a young woman, uncompromising in every respect, who battles at every turn against her upbringing and environment in Southern Rhodesia, who fights for her individuality and self-determination at any cost.

Reviews

Passionate and compelling, a book so packed with extraordinary images that it has obliterated almost everything else I read in 1994. Rose Tremain

In this immediate, vivid, beautifully paced memoir, Doris Lessing sets the individual against history, the personal against the general and shows, by the example of her life set down honestly, how biography and fiction mesh, how fiction transmutes the personal to the general, how the particular experience illuminates the universe. By putting her life on the page, she has created her greatest work of art. Hilary Mantel, LRB

The book pulsates with life. The intensity of the sensory world is brilliantly evoked Not just the story of the first thirty years of one life, this is the biography also of an age. Jane Dunn, Observer

Author Bio

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.