Thursday, October 11, 2007

Lessing Honored With Nobel In Literature

I was introduced to Doris Lessing's work well into my 40's when I returned to graduate school. One of my professor's was, and is, a Lessing scholar. My favorite Lessing novel remains "The Grass Is Singing," her first and rather slim novel published in 1950. It's a little daunting to write a final essay for an English Lit professor who's a well-known published scholar on Lessing--- and Woolf, for that matter.

So, when I approached writing an essay on Lessing's most widely read novel,"The Golden Notebook," I did so with a fair amount of trepidation. What could I say that had not been said before? Fortunately, my bookshelf held a fairly recent book "The Six Thinking Hats" by renowned psychologist and physiologist Dr. Edward DeBono. He associated thinking and decision making to emotion, creativity, intuition, or negativity and represented each by color. It struck me when reading "The Golden Notebook" that Lessing's protagonist Anna very much associated color with thinking--I took off on this notion with my essay. And was excited to learn that this approach really was a fresh one in studying Lessing's work!

A few years later, I read where Lessing was coming to San Francisco and had hoped to attend, I think it was to be at the Herbst Theatre. Lessing was not able to come after all due to health problems---she was well into her 80's. What a nice honor today to receive a Nobel for her prolific and audacious body of work.