TAP Online associate editor Phoebe Connelly tells us why Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's frank writing about women's sexuality and inner lives was politically groundbreaking:
Lessing's commitment (a word she used in her 1957 essay, "The Small Personal Voice," to describe the role of writers) to the obligations of her chosen craft have always set her apart. "... The minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible."Lessing belongs, as it were, to the women (and men) whose political struggles she articulated so well. By writing honestly about the ways in which women struggle with gender roles, motherhood, and sexuality, she threw open the doors to a more complex understanding of social interactions, and validated women's experiences as key to political transformation. Moreover, it is a theme she has continued to rally around. (Her most recent book The Cleft is a fable about how the two sexes developed, positing women as the first sex and men as the interlopers.) Lessing's restless intellect and her refusal to be pigeonholed, as a feminist writer or within a genre, has made her one of the most relevant social commentators of our time. Lessing does not write about politics -- she writes them. Because the real heart of feminist politics, and, we should hope, left politics, is the recognition of inequality.
Read the whole thing (and comment) here. --The Editors
