Birth of Doris Lessing

Doris May Tayler was born on October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (modern-day Iran), where her father worked as a bank clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia after being wounded in World War I. Her mother had been a nurse who cared for her father during his recovery from a leg amputation.

In 1925, when Doris was five years old, the family relocated to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in colonial Africa, drawn by promises of prosperous farming. The family settled on a maize farm, an experience that would profoundly shape her worldview and later fiction, exposing her early to the racial inequities of colonial society, the harshness of rural life, and the isolation of the African veld.

This African childhood — marked by an unhappy home life, an unconventional and often absent formal education (she left school at age fourteen), and voracious self-directed reading — became the foundational material for much of her literary career. Her upbringing under British colonial rule in Africa, combined with her mother's strict Victorian sensibilities and her father's disillusionment after the war, created the psychological and political tensions that would later animate her celebrated novels, including The Grass Is Singing and the Children of Violence series.