Lessing, in the course of more than 50 books, has become an “epicist of the female experience,” the Nobel committee said, who “with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”
Her books have plumbed the deep divide across which men and women talk at each other, the painful racial fractures and stultifying suburbia of colonial Africa, the earnestness and silliness of Communism, the ways in which passion still skulks in an aging woman’s heart. She has been alternately adored by feminists for her acute chronicles of what it means to be intelligent and frustrated and female, and reviled by them for renouncing, not a little imperiously, much of what they hold dear.
more from the LA Times here.