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:	9780060926649
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/01/1995
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.01(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

"Absorbing...Arouses our cheers and sympathy...Her work is cathartic and exhilarating." — Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Compelling reading...Readers familiar with Doris Lessing's work will savor her self-revelations in Under My Skin flavored with her characteristic wry tone." — Chicago Tribune Books

"Extraordinary. . . Eloquent. . . Lessing recounts this passage in her life with complex candor...[and] with the vividness of a fine novelist." — New York Times Book Review

"Lessing summons the girl from half a century ago with such freshness and immediacy that she seems alive today." — Ms. magazine

"One of the 20th century's most important and influential novelist here presents a memoir as probing, unsparing and darkly funny as her fiction." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Reminds us of what an autobiography can do in the hands of a master." — Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

"Absorbing...Arouses our cheers and sympathy...Her work is cathartic and exhilarating."

Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Lessing summons the girl from half a century ago with such freshness and immediacy that she seems alive today."

Ms. magazine

"Compelling reading...Readers familiar with Doris Lessing's work will savor her self-revelations in Under My Skin flavored with her characteristic wry tone."

Chicago Tribune Books

"Extraordinary. . . Eloquent. . . Lessing recounts this passage in her life with complex candor...[and] with the vividness of a fine novelist."

New York Times Book Review

"Reminds us of what an autobiography can do in the hands of a master."

Washington Post Book World

"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