LONDON — Doris Lessing emerged from a black cab outside her home in London one day in 2007 and was confronted by a horde of reporters. When told she had won the Nobel Prize, she retorted, “Oh, Christ! … I couldn’t care less.”
That was typical of the independent — and often irascible — author who died Sunday after a long career that included “The Golden Notebook,” a 1962 novel than made her an icon of the women’s movement.
Lessing’s books reflected her own improbable journey across the former British Empire, and later her vision of a future ravaged by atomic warfare.
The exact cause of Lessing’s death at her home in London was not immediately disclosed. She was 94.
“Even in very old age, she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational,” said her editor at HarperCollins, Nicholas Pearson.
Lessing explored topics ranging from colonial Africa to dystopian Britain, from the mystery of being female to the unknown worlds of science fiction. In winning the Nobel literature prize, the Swedish Academy praised Lessing for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.”
The often-polarizing Lessing never saved her fire for the page. The targets of her vocal ire in recent years included former President George W. Bush — “a world calamity” — and modern women — “smug, self-righteous.”
She also raised hackles by deeming the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States “not that terrible.”
She remains best known for “The Golden Notebook,” in which heroine Anna Wulf uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating life.
The novel covers a range of previously unmentionable female conditions — menstruation, orgasms and frigidity — and made Lessing an icon for women’s liberation. But it became so widely talked about and dissected that she later referred to it as a “failure” and “an albatross.”
“It took realism apart from the inside,” said Lorna Sage, an academic who knew Lessing since the 1970s. “Lessing threw over the conventions she grew up in to stage a kind of breakdown — to celebrate disintegration as the representative experience of a generation.”
Although she continued to publish at least one book every two years, she received little attention for her later works.
Lessing was 88 when she won the Nobel literature prize, making her the oldest recipient of the award.
Born Doris May Tayler on Oct. 22, 1919, in Persia (now Iran), where her father was a bank manager, Lessing moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at age 5 and lived there until she was 29.
At 19, she married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had a son and a daughter. She left that family in her early 20s and became drawn into the Left Book Club, a group of literary communists and socialists headed by Gottfried Lessing, the man who would become her second husband and father her third child.
She is survived by her daughter Jean and granddaughters Anna and Susannah.
