ABSTRACT
Although Doris Lessing was actually born in Persia and has lived in England since 1949, she is considered an African author because the twenty-five years that she spent growing up on a small farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia had such an impact on her writing. African critic Anthony J. Chennells notes that she is one of only two “settler novelists” included in the 1987 Tabex Encyclopedia Zimbabwe (Sprague, In Pursuit, 17). Lessing is described by American critic Judith Gardiner as a “colonial in exile” whose work is characterized by “a fruitful unsettledness that makes … [her both an] inheritor … and [an] antagonist … to imperialism. … The English literary tradition is the reassuring heritage of a mother tongue, but it is also somewhat alien” (13).
