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

by Doris Lessing

Overview

"I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by...robust and efficient hands."

The experiences absorbed through these "skins too few" are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060171506
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/28/1994
Edition description:	1st U.S. ed
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing was one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, the James Tait Black Prize for best biography, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize and Prix Catalunya, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

October 22, 1919

Place of Birth:

Persia (now Iran)

Editorial Reviews

"What is better than a really good biography? Not many novels," says Lessing in her first chapter of what is destined to be one of the best autobiographies of our time. Although Lessing has incorporated her life into nearly all of her novels, most notably the Martha Quest series, and has published some short autobiographical sketches, this is her first full-length autobiography, with a second volume projected to cover 1950 onward. From her childhood in the wilds of what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) through her young married life in Salisbury to her Communist years during World War II, Lessing is able both to capture the immediacy of her youthful feelings and to comment on her past self with both compassion and the distance that maturity brings. This is a wonderfully vivid memoir that reveals the origins of a remarkable writer. It also gives the reader a direct connection to the physical and emotional experiences of childhood and youth that are universal and timeless. For all collections.-Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Library Journal

With the same combination of burning intimacy and social commentary that made "The Golden Notebook" (1962) a classic of our times, Lessing writes about her childhood and coming-of-age in southern Africa. This is a sprawling autobiography--she admits that her fiction "makes a better job of the truth"--yet scenes and sentences hit you with a flash of recognition, articulating what you didn't know you felt. The best parts are about childhood, the intense physicality of it, "all the din and stink and smother." She didn't fit in. Beneath her jolly, competent public persona, she raged against her disappointed mother who wanted a well-brought-up little English girl. Two things saved Lessing and helped make her a writer: she read and read and read; and she roamed free in the wild bush around the farm. Yet always she was waiting to leave. At home, at boarding school, through two disastrous marriages and several casual affairs, the door was slammed shut. She hated the savage myths of "white civilization"; looking back now, she also evokes the absurdity of her Communist fervor. The fragments are unified by one thought: "Soon (but when?) I'll be out of here." Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Hazel Rochman