ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Doris Lessing, a feminist thinker, who was born in Persia. By moving to London in 1949, she was joining an influx of immigrants to the war-scarred city. Lessing's first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950 and her final novel, Alfred and Emily, appeared in 2008. Between these two publications, Lessing achieved a remarkably productive career as a writer mainly, but not exclusively, of fiction. Lessing received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Edith Frampton's study of the "revulsion that Mary experiences in relation to the lactating bodies of African women" in Lessing's The Grass is Singing offers another example of Lessing writing the female body. In her 1971 Preface to The Golden Notebook, Lessing emphasized that her novel pre-dated second wave feminism: "This book was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women's Liberation movements already existed".
